I’ve lived in the US my entire life. I wish I could tell you your wrong.
I can’t.
Some of my earliest memories revolve around watching the evening news, listening to them say that “X amount of American lives were lost” and wondering why “American” lives were substantially different or worthy of note. A life lost is a life lost. And that’s a tragedy no matter how you slice it. Where that life started or where it lived has no bearing whatsoever on it’s value.
At least… that’s what I believe. The current state of things has me thinking I might be in the minority on that one.
As to revolution, protest, anything that could even prove an inconvenience to the status quo… I’ll believe it when I see it. Not to make excuses, but I think forces in the American culture have been working to defang popular protest since at least the civil rights movement, or perhaps even earlier. Even if it’s demostriably wrong… I can’t begin to tell you how demoralized I feel. My government just… went and did this. It’s illegal. The very shape of our government is supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening. And yet… here we are. One illegal invasion and (apparently) kidnapping of a sovereign head of state later.
…I wish it were otherwise, but it feels like there’s very little that can be done about it. Americans just… don’t seem equal to the task of holding their government to account. The one thing we are supposed to be good at.
I can’t even begin to tell you how many outrages there were up to this point. Too many. Far too many for concence to allow. This… feels different. Is different. Has to be different, then the way we’ve been allowing things to ride.
But… I’ve been disappointed before. I’m certain I’ll be disappointed again. I hope this will be different, but…
…I can point to plenty of times it should have been different before. Times that would have prevented this from happening. It’s… hard to maintain hope in the face of that.
That’s fair, I was quite tired when I wrote what I wrote so let me expand on that a little bit.
That is of course true in most situations. I should have clarified this more but primarily when I said “I grew up watching the evening news” I was talking about war on terror coverage.
I’m not pretending that’s not how people work, it absolutely is and that’s the reason this was exploited. But… there’s this kind of… preformative agony to the whole ordeal that, speaking as an American, does feel uniquely American.
Empathizing with the death of people you’re close with is natural. But when, as in Iraq or Afghanistan, they are active participants in why people are dying, and then they’re deaths are used to justify sending more people over there to kill and be killed…
…It kinda just soured me on the whole affair to be honest. And, given the events of last night? It’s something I could easily see happening again. We seem to have dusted off everything else from the Iraq playbook, why not that too?
Anyways, we’re not disagreeing. There was just more to my point that didn’t quite make it into my post.