yes i am an american.

but the general sentiments i see online about americans are wildly ignorant and it genuinely pisses me off how the global rising tide in fascism is == america in a lot of people’s minds. guess it’s just easier to engage in the same idiotic nonsense the fascists do than to engage in any critical thinking.

two primary points:

  1. americans aren’t just fucking lazy and aren’t just “letting” things happen. some victim blaming bullshit if i ever heard it. it also very much demonstrates that despite your “european worldliness” you’ve never left your tiny village/corner of the earth and seen anything different in this world besides the one time you went to monaco as a teen. americans don’t protest for a variety of socioeconomic and political factors, not one of which is “they don’t give a shit.” most americans live in cities that are incredibly far apart from one another and, in the context of a single given city, usually pretty demographically consistent actually. a given city won’t vary much inside that city, but might be very different from another city. this means americans, limited by their lack of walking infrastructure and their cities being massively spread apart in a spatial sense, really can only choose to effectively spontaneously protest in their local city and neighboring municipalities. most people there already probably agree with you to a degree, it’s preaching to the choir. seats of political power here are hundreds of thousands of miles away from most people. it would be like, a literal fucking LOTR scale and size adventure for most americans to go protest their government. and this is intentional. that is why they don’t. not because they don’t want to. not because they’re ignorant. not because they’ve given up. it is because they physically, economically, and even rationally; just can’t do it. they’re as much a victim as anyone else. this is something being done to them, not by them.

  2. this stupidly fucking ignorant notion that somehow americans are single-handedly responsible for western neofascism. guess what? for decades, you guys lazily sat and got fucking fat on corpo cheese too; it isn’t just americans who fell prey to this centuries spanning grift! europeans have exactly all the same problems with entrenched corporatism in their societies and feel too proud to notice it or do anything about it before the same things happening here happen there; except this time in an entirely homegrown sense instead of being imported from america. americans just, for better or worse, did capitalism more and better than anyone else in history. our collapse and reckoning happened to come first chronologically, for that reason. make no mistake, though, friend. we all have our hands in the collapse-pot. this is something much bigger than just a nation state or people. this is the end of nation states, the end of an existing world order. those who recognize this will do well in this life, those who don’t won’t.

sorry for my unhinged babbling rant i just got lots of feelings, ideas, and thoughts and nowhere to have discourse.

hope not to offend anyone. love all the european homies.

EDIT: at exactly 16 upvotes and 16 downvotes on this post rn. proud to have said something truly divisive lmao ;)

  • jwmgregory@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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    18 hours ago

    The vast majority of protests are happening near the places where the people live. All the protests I have been too were not at the place of our government. It was our city and the next one. No long travel time and it still works.

    maybe i could have phrased myself better. this is essentially what i mean by the first point. you only have the option of local protests in america, for the most part. the unfortunate reality is that for the millions of americans who’s locality doesn’t include those political seats of power, it actually doesn’t work.

    how many times in the news have you seen americans sitting in tiny local protests with their signs? how many times have you seen it actually lead to anything happening, other than a live demonstration of police brutality?

    it doesn’t work. americans by and large recognize this, their apathetic attitudes aren’t some weird form of jackassery they are a rational response to their situation.

    i don’t know what we should do. but continually disparaging americans for their lack of will or protests isn’t it. they’re not protesting en masse because they live in a social and political climate that explicitly prevents them from doing so, and disarms them when they actually manage to do it.

    “those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable”

    -jfk

    “i, -er -uh, would like the party plattah!”

    -also jfk, but in clone high (the cooler jfk imo)