#“but we're the greatest country in the world” EVERY PATRIOT IN EVERY COUNTRY THINKS THAT THEIR COUNTRY IS THE BEST IN THE WORLD

[flying-cat]

why are trump supporters all Like That

[bilbobagginsomebabez]

i've been stuck on this all damn day because like a third of my job is educating on the american poverty crisis and it's just. baffling. the chasm between the view from the ground vs what international folks and americans themselves believe is going on.

sorry this is on your post, op

i know what's going on with it from a variety of angles here-- how the fuck americans fail to realize that 62% of our own population can't afford to live in this godforsaken country, that is. american society is deeply, deeply segregated by both race and class, our history education actively obfuscates the reality of our development and contemporary socioeconomic reality, the military industrial complex and its imperial role relies on cult-like reinforcement of patriotism in public life, we're largely ignorant of the cultures or practices of anywhere else due to american supremacy ("greatest country in the world!! obviously we don't need anyone else's feedback"), and, due to the extensive nature of our severe segregation, we're offered few opportunities to confront the dissonance outside of the individual decision to seek it out. americans fail to recognize when their own community members have fallen into poverty because when you drop below a certain income threshold, you literally disappear from public life. we do not have places that you can be in public for free. it's complicated and fucked up and can often be boiled down to the fact that americans literally commit to trickle-down economics, literally believe that by bloating the wealth of the rich, we'll all get fat off their scraps.

internationally, i cannot tell if its just the vast amounts of propaganda we produce or if you guys also think that we genuinely do get fat off the scraps of our economic aristocracy or what pieces of our cultural iceberg elude y'all, but it's just. really really goddamn difficult to get Americans to understand they're fucked when the rest of the world actually believes the average american lives like the brady bunch or [fuck] the kardashians. international folks repeat to americans who Do Not Have It Good that they've got it so much better than the majority of citizens in every other country that they couldn't even comprehend it and it reinforces the american exceptionalism and american supremacy on both ends, like the nastiest fucking snake eating its own tail. international folks carry on believing the propaganda and american folks are further convinced they have nothing to learn from anyone else and should never take a peek at how other countries do it because we're grand! the grandest! greatest fuckin country in the world, right? richest country in the world with all the best stuff and all the best lives. and i've only been talking poverty! not even gun violence or police brutality or actual fucking racism. it's fucking absurd. it's toxic american exceptionalism at its worst.

american prosperity is not spread around. that big number and all that money goes to billionaires and it goes to the military. on an individual level, the ones who live and work closest to the aristocrats are given progressively fancier trinkets to fight over. the poors who hear endlessly that america has it so much better we can't even comprehend it believe that their ongoing death matches over the trinket basket is the best way to live, the only way to live, and better than anyone else's life in any other country permanently and forever.

and because of this stupid toxic american exceptionalist ourobouros, neither americans nor international folks are able to understand how severely the destruction of american communities exacerbates all this bullshit. we've replaced every ounce of a legitimate social fabric with transactional "services," individualized and paywalled every aspect of human life for extraction. we're genuinely fucked in ways that need to be brought to light and everyone constantly screaming we're fine because they're picturing the economic context of The Middle or Modern Family or whatever is not helping.

One of the horrible things about the prosperity of the United States is that they've managed to make the cost of living so high that their incredibly high levels of wealth only really show up on the periphery of people's lives.

Americans earn stupendous amounts of absolute money but you can only tell because they have the ability to spend money on things that don't actually improve their lives very much, often because they don't have another choice.

People's claims about the failure of the United States online are often overblown yelling that exaggerate the size of the genuinely bad situation faced by the most vulnerable people, but by GDP per capita you'd really expect the United States to be a much better place to live.