I suppose I feel like every other human that is just trying to survive on this world. Country of origin doesn’t really mean shit to me any more unless I start getting generalized in conversations on Lemmy.
Dear Americans, What does it feel like and what it means to be American?
Submitted 1 day ago by 
beep@piefed.world to ask@piefed.social
Comments
remotelove@lemmy.ca 20 hours ago
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 1 day ago
I’ll play along because why not?
I think something kind of extraordinary is happening right now in the States along the lines of belief systems running in to various brick walls of reality. The relevant backstory is that there are a collection of myths about the United States, and a lot of people bought in to those myths over the years. Myths about greatness, liberty, equality, throwing off tyranny, and accepting all peoples. Not that there weren’t grains of truth there, but with most of those, there was plenty of distortion and exaggeration going on IMO.
Combine that with the States having a roughly four decade period of greatness based on non-replicable events that ended roughly in the mid-70’s. My impression is that most Americans came to believe that such was a kind of birthright and inherent feature of being an American, and would automatically be upheld by the universe, or something like that.
Both of those things together led to a sort of fatal and complacent overconfidence, not unlike Putin and most Russians thinking of Ukrainians as a sort of backwards peoples and the nation as being ripe for the plucking. Or maybe the much older idea that Rome was the greatest civilisation in the world and could never fall. In any case, the pattern repeats almost endlessly through history, I find. My final point is just that loads of Americans these days are in the “finding out” stage, although how many of them are going to frame the problematic backstory the same way I did is more doubtful, I think. IMO there’s moreso going to be a lot of confused and angry people, but it remains to be seen if their disgruntlement will make the difference in the upcoming elections.
You mean Americans or USians ?????