this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
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I've never felt drawn to the Twitter model of social media. I've been staying away from the more large volume communities for similar reasons, and last month I added a bunch of keyword blocks for things like Trump/Elon/RKF and my feed has been much improved. I already know anything about them will just be bad, and if anything actually serious goes on, I'll hear about it from any of the multitude of mainstream news sources. I don't need Lemmy filled with it all too. I keep this place for fun.
Ugh, US politics right now is trash if you're an American, I can only imagine how old it has gotten for those who aren't. It's not like near every other country is going through equal drama of their own right now. My FOMO finally lost out, and I feel it's a total improvement. Like I said, it's not like I won't hear something truly important from a million other places. I don't need to hear about every bit of brain diarrhea these people have for the next however many years. If they actually start doing anything, wake me up then. The opposition is too busy infighting to slow anything down much anyway. If you live in a place where you've still got a chance to stop things before it's too late, I wish you luck!
Some percentage of people will say things for attention, and I try not to publicly comment such things like you mention, but I feel it is natural to think them.
Our first instinct in comprehending something is going to be relating it to something we already know and understand. To an American, that's going to be something in their life here they can relate it to. We can say, oh here is some horrible stuff, I could imagine this group I don't like doing something like this. America can't even cover its own news well, let alone global news. We don't have context to a lot of what will be going on in parts of the world we aren't familiar with. Many of us don't even get to leave our home states still, let alone get over to other countries to learn about other people. It's really unfortunate.
So while we can sound ignorant by saying things like that, I think most people are just trying to wrap their head around something horrible in the only way they can understand. I have a constant desire to ask "why?" so I try to take time to learn the backstory to events, but there's only so much I can gain from reading that you know because you've lived through it. Sometimes people need to shut up and listen before reacting. As you said, it can steal the spotlight from the actual tragedy and redirect it to someone else's problem, but there's probably a better time and place. But people need to cope with what bad thing they just read, and they will express it in the only terms they can.
Most of us don't even know that much about our own country's problems. We know what gets told to us, but I don't think many look far beyond that. It's depressing, and I can see not wanting to put extra effort into learning how every country is depressing no matter where in history you go. For someone like yourself that has a better understanding because it's the life you live, it's got to be obnoxious seeing endless bad takes and irrelevant conversation. It's got to be like when you watch a show/movie that talks about something you do for a living and you see the actors doing things that would never happen in real life and it's just like, did the writers not talk to anyone that actually knew anything about this first???
For things like the women getting taken away for not wearing hijab and such, we have many unanswered questions of our own that are similar. During the police violence protests a few years back, we had police covering their department logos and name badges and they were throwing people in unmarked vehicles. Things like that are new to us, and that makes it hard for us to understand. We then see your protesters taken away in a similar manner and we look to draw a parallel to try and understand. Are the situations related? Perhaps not, but we're expressing our thoughts in real time through some of these comments, so they may be out of line, but you're hopefully watching someone grow mentally, and if they are concerned by what is going on, hopefully they will end up doing more digging into what is going on in both the situation over here, but also over there as well.
I've tried to learn more of the history of the Middle East, Africa, and other places as well through reading news and not really being able to grasp the full effect of what it was I read. But there's a whole lot of history, a whole lot of depressing things, and not a lot of positivity for the future.
I suppose the only inverse situation I can give is about gun things, since that seems to be one of the big things about America people outside of here don't get. There are just so many guns here. If we stopped making or buying new guns, you could still give everyone probably at least 5. Most non-Americans really can't seem to grasp that because it's different from where many of you live and how it's been for a long time there. Most countries seem to have at least a few arms restrictions. In that sense we come from different realities because it's alien to many of you, while it's ingrained in our culture. In all our media, there is glorified violence, we hold armed police and military people to ridiculously high regard. Even those of use that aren't gun fans probably support people who are armed. The perplexion those people get from reading about all our mass killings is hopefully not something you relate to. You may have militia type groups killing each other and many times hurting civilians by mistake, but we have regular everyday people killing other everyday people and that sounds pretty uncommon for most parts of the world.
This is getting long, so I just want to say, we don't usually mean to be self-absorbed. It's just many times how we've been raised.
America is advertised to us and everyone else as a place of near unlimited freedom. But a lot of us are learning this may or may not have been true once, but many aspects of our society are getting exposed as something else, and it's quite recent for us. We see officials becoming openly corrupt. We see police turning on citizens while protecting the wealthy. We see people being told they are not allowed to see certain doctors. We see people trying to make their brand of religion law. We see blind eyes turned to genocide. These things we were taught were un-American. These were only things done by despots. So why now, do we see them at home? Our Republicans were traditionally the ones that were preparing to combat any threat of dictatorship. They hated Russia and other authoritarian governments. They were all for the rights of individuals. But many things have happened since World War 2, and now all of that is backwards, and we see near half of our country is talking like the authoritarians were right all along.
We just aren't ready to cope with all this that we could be one of these despotic countries, and it's very scary in a way we aren't used to. Especially as many civil rights here aren't much more than 50 years old. Women have only been able to vote for a hundred years. Equal rights on started for black people in the 60s and we haven't even gotten that far on that yet. Rights for LGBT+ people are very new. It seemed we were on a pretty good trajectory to become better people, but the ones who did not like it seem to have hit their limit and are fighting back very hard, and now have the upper hand in almost every part of our government.
Good and evil don't know our borders. We have many people here, probably the majority, that would love to help people in your country and around the world. I'm sure your country is full of mostly good people too. Yet while the individuals seem to be good, something seems to corrupt us as institutions. One trans activist I listen to was recently discussing her neighbors after a massive flood in one part of our country where many people were stranded or died. She said her neighbors have all the Trump and company signs and if asked would probably say they don't approve of her being trans. But she also said she didn't feel they were any immediate danger to her, because at the end of the day, they lived together, and she felt even though they weren't comfortable with her being her, she didn't think it was to the extent that they would just sit back and watch something bad happen to her. She said the same that even though she hates their politics, she doesn't want to see them die, she just wishes they would grow out of their hateful beliefs. If we had some kind of civil war here again, much of my family and of my girlfriend's family would be on the other side, and I can't even begin to imagine that.
We are just people like you. We feel powerless at home, let alone across the planet. I would give everyone a home and safety and food and the freedom to be who they want to be if it were within my power. I don't understand how a person could put wealth or fame or power above wanting to do good for their fellow people. But we are all given just enough to try to keep us from revolting. Some people do want to kill gay and trans people here though. Some do want to impose religious law. It's insane to me that anyone is still stoned or beheaded these days while we are sending probes to the ends of the solar system. It seems like the 2 things should be so exclusive of each other that we could be this advanced yet so backwards at once.
To people reading this news of these things going on around the world, it's generally only going to be done by people here who do care at least a bit about what is happening to you there. It's just causing us to see something in a reflection of ourselves as a country that we weren't expecting to see, and you show us a glimpse to our possible future, and that takes it from learning about someone else's predicament into something a bit more self-centered, but more immediate to us personally that we may not have been prepared for.
I'm not glad you have to take risks to maintain an outside perspective, but I am glad that you do. It's important to have things flowing in and out from everywhere. We learn what each other are experiencing and how we are trying to deal with it. While we may not be able to always cooperate as states, there is nothing that can stop us as individuals. No state will last forever. Greece, Rome, Spain, England, Turkey, Mongolia, whatever empire you look at once seemed it would last forever. One day nobody will care about the US anymore either. A lot of bad happens until then, but all we can do is keep doing the best we can to be good people.
I'm glad I was able to help you find another perspective. Talking with people who have taken the time to explain things to me is how I've learned the most about people in other situations. The world can feel small sometimes, but as a white person from the country, even the lives of my coworkers of color from the nearest city can be so different from my own. There are many stories we will never hear, so I want to hear all of the ones that people take the time to share with me. It is how we grow, understand, and hopefully avoid making some of the mistakes of our past and present over again in the future. Sometimes spending some time, patience, and a little effort is the best thing we can do for each other.