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:
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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.
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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 ;)
As a german, I can assure you that most people are not blanket-blaming you guys on anything yet. The internet is not representative IMO, and I think most people hope for a literal Luigi moment, to give us all peace again.
But the hatred against trump, musk, vance, and the other nazis is on another level.
your response genuinely meant a lot to me.
sanity needle in the insane haystack and all.
good luck from across the pond. you guys are in one of the least forgiving geopolitical positions on the world-stage. whatever the future holds for germany, it is significant.
i dreamed as a highschooler of "amerexiting" to germany in order to complete a program at one of the hochschulen. i'd be lying if i said i didn't still fantasize about it. i have an associate's degree and am working on a bachelor's here. maybe getting out is still possible, idk. i want to fix my home. not to be lame but i genuinely cried a little writing that. i don't want to leave. i want things to be better here, the people i care about to be cared for.
that seems less and less possible as the days drag on.
America as a whole can't be fixed. But parts of it can. To put it in Lemmy terms, blue states need to defederate from the US. The US system is broken and it's too large to be fixed. It will always be dragged down by the lowest common denominators. In the West, we can have Cascadia, and the NorthEast can become it's own thing. It just takee the balls of leadership to decide to actually secede and stop playing this failed experiment.
Let the conservatives have middle America and the South.
i see a lot of people suggesting succession on both sides of the political aisle here nowadays.
it actually really hurts to read, hurts my heart, hurts my soul. every single time i see the opinion espoused.
we are one people.
i dont disagree with the general sentiment that the union shows signs of age, is falling apart, and for the most part serves to prop up places that are generally 3rd world shit holes (i.e alabama, the south) using the wealth of some of the richest economies to ever grace the earth (nyse, the entirety of california and the valley, etc.). in many ways, the union is an expression of imperialism over the american continent.
but again, we are one people.
to break apart the union would be tragic. millions would never see their dads and moms, brothers and sisters, family; ever again. many still yet would likely be forced to kill those very same people in order to wrought to reality the will of the "leadership with the balls to stop playing this failed experiment." it is a mockery of the value of human life to compare something of this gravitas with defederating a Lemmy instance, but i can see why you would want to make the comparison. it really isn't so easy, tho.
again, again, again; we are one people.
i will stand against secessionist rhetoric as long as i live. maybe some places in world would be better off without the union, for a time. overall, however, we as a people are far too intimately connected, far too ingratiated in each other's lives for secession to ever be a valid argument again. the number of lives ruined and extinguished is far too great a cost to make pursuing a breakup of the union worthwhile within our lifetimes.
we don't have to keep our relic from ole '76 forever, that isn't what this means.
it just means a rote breakup of the union is such a bad idea as to be idiotic. maybe the states would be better served by european union style confederacy. i don't know. i just know our destinies are extrinsically linked and we cannot change that;
we are one people.
We are not one people. We never were. We were always disparate populations.
And we need to be allowed to do our own thing. We are "one people" in the same way that Britain and France are "one people". You can still accept the humanity of others and visit other countries. Secession doesn't necessarily mean we become North and South Korea. But pretending the American identity is some sacred thing that shouldn't be broken is childish imo. This country has only existed for 200 years. It's not sacred. And it's rotten and deserves to be dismantled.