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  • Invertedouroboros@lemmy.worldEnglish
    414·
    4 days ago

    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.

    • pishadoot@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      5·
      4 days ago

      I mean, philosophically all lives are equal.

      But you value people you love, your family (I assume) more than your neighbors. And you care about what happens in your town more than in another city in your country, and you care more about your country than others…

      USA had a pretty bad plane crash a couple months ago in Louisville; about a dozen people died. I care, it was a tragedy, but I guarantee you that the people in Louisville care a lot more than I do.

      And it’s the same reason a nation will care more about its citizens vs the citizens of other nations. Kind of obtuse to pretend that’s not how people work, no?

      • Invertedouroboros@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        4 days ago

        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.

        • pishadoot@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          3 days ago

          They are yes, as opposed to subjectively on varying levels of personal familiarity. You’d care far more about your spouse or mother dying than a random person in a different country you had no idea existed.

          That doesn’t mean that a random person’s life has more intrinsic value than your mother’s, but TO YOU they will have less. Hence, lives are equal in a philosophical sense but pragmatically that’s not how the world works, ever, or we’d be in a constant state of unending grief at the loss of our fellow humans 24/7.

      • Onyxonblack@lemmy.zipEnglish
        35·
        4 days ago

        I’m sorry but I’m just going to disagree with you. As a Misanthropic Anti-Natalist, I proudly hate all humans. If a plane crashes in my state I’m more happy than if it happened in a different state.

        I want the USA to burn and fall. I want our fearless leader to die slowly in agony as someone literally eats him in front of him, slowly cutting off parts and cooking it right there in front of our demented orange demon. I will be happy when all humans are extinct.

        Giving this planet back to the animals and plants is the only thing I dream of. I wish there was a button to release the biophage and infect the entire Human population with a designer-plague that kills us all and leaves the animals and plants alone.

        So no, not everyone gives a fuck whether people dying locally or across the planet makes any difference! Humans are nightmare creatures. Literal monsters!