Submitted 3 weeks ago by DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
For Context: I’m Chinese American, and I do not feel “ashamed” for my heritage, neither do I feel “ashamed” for being a US Citizen.
The CCP is not my fault. I do not feel any shame of saying I’m from China.
Similarly, the trump admin is not my fault, I voted Harris. I do not feel any shame for being American.
So what is the thought process of people feeling shame/guilt?
You don’t have to be at fault to be ashamed.
I feel deeply embarrassed about being from the US. It’s like hanging out with a group of friends out of necessity, later realizing they were all assholes, and trying to come to terms with the fact you spent so many years with them. I love outside the US now and I’m even more embarrassed to be from the US. Every time there’s some culture shock my takeaway is either “wow how did I normalize this broken aspect of the US” or “I wish I was from somewhere that didn’t do those things to that person’s country”.
I also feel embarrassed and guilty over getting out of the US. I worked in tech and now I’m living off tech savings to start a life outside the US. I left my friends behind many of them are struggling financially, I left my community behind many of which are actively homeless, I chose to leave. Sure I’m leaving in part because my trans ass is on the chopping block but I see a lot of trans people fight harder instead of flee. I fought for so many years though and I couldn’t keep doing it so I left. The US did this to my community, made me confront choices I never wanted to make, I’m disgusted by having paid taxes to the war machine, and I justify working in tech as a way out of there but really I feel guilty over choosing to buy into that side of the US too so I could secure personal safety.
guilty over getting out of the US
Please don’t feel guilty for leaving somewhere you don’t like. That is your right. Stay safe, friend.
Living in the USA myself, I feel shame at how I normalized and rationalized the horrible aspects of this country. I’d already been a minimalist and was anti-consumerism from before I was an adult; but I had downplayed the severity of our systemic violence until it hit me personally. Above all I wish I was doing more to fight this system, like the people you described.
For as long as I am alive I will stay in the USA. I’m not going to give up on holding out here, as miserable as I’ve felt this last year. I’d like to believe something I do may someday inspire others who are braver and have more resources to do something more concrete.
Don’t feel guilty for seeing the signs and getting out whilst you still can. Millions of people throughout history haven’t been as fortunate.
Once Trump and Project 2025 is done with immigrants you can bet your arse the pendulum will swing onto LGBQT people in earnest
Not the pendulum. The gunfire.
China has been China-ing for a while, we get it. America’s actions are relatively fresh, and a majority of us DID choose him. While I’ll immediately reassure people that I didn’t vote for him, the fact that I have to separate myself from what’s going on comes from a sense of shame over that.
That said, if I met a Russian I wouldn’t necessarily hold the invasion of Ukraine against them… But I might have to ask if they really support that shit.
America's actions are relatively fresh,
At the risk of being annoying as shit, that is not true. The only fresh part is that Europeans and/or white people are feeling a small part of the heat too.
was just going to say this. anyone who thinks this is new didn’t pay attention in history class, or that history class conveniently glossed over or romanticized our many, many atrocities.
Ok, a majority of voters, not a majority of us, but as another commenter said if you sat this one out you basically helped the winner and I’m absolutely going to blame you for it
China has been eliminating poverty for quite some time. In fact, over the last 70 years, China accounts for 80% or more of the entire global poverty alleviation gains. The US has created more poverty in that same time.
But also, the US has been racist, violent, colonialist, jingoistic, misogynistic, and white supremacist since it’s founding. You know those propaganda images DHS posts on Twitter? Those are from the US’s time of westward expansion. This isn’t new. What’s new is that we have given up on trying to hide it, which is something we did for for the last 70 years. But even in the 40s we had concretation camps, we had open racism in all of politics, we had the second largest Nazi group in the world.
And after WW2? Operation Paperclip? Operation Gladio? The US openly staffed NATO with Nazi officers. The US openly advocated for Nazi politicians to lead West Germany. There were literal Nazis running West German after the war.
And then of course the Korean War. The Vietnam War. The Irag wars. The Afghanistan war. The embargo against Cuba. The coup in Iran.
This is what the US is. Nixon banner heroin explicitly to imprison black people. We have slave labor producing billions of dollars in value annually. And we punish our prison slaves who don’t work by giving them solitary. All of that is massive gross human rights violations, things we’ve pretended to invade other countries for.
This is who we are. It’s not new.
Considering voter turnout is ridiculously low in America the majority of us did not choose Trump. Just less than half of those that voted did which is 32% of the population. Also, Trump was not exactly the start of American decline, it is more like he is a symptom of it. A reaction to it if you would. American has been a violent an oppressive nation that we should be ashamed of for roughly 250 years.
Not voting is a vote for the winner by default. I highly doubt that every single person that didn’t vote did so due to being unable to.
a majority of us DID choose him
77m voted for Trump which is 32% of the voting age population.
As a percentage of the overall population it is ~23%.
I grew up in Indonesia, my sister is from Java, my brother is from Singapore. I’m natively from California, and I’m a huge white boy. I am ashamed that the country of the free, the country of the brave who had bounteous arms to welcome the downtrodden and abused of the world is no longer that place. Instead it’s the land of the secret police, tbe land of a pedophile traitor president who can’t stand any kind of criticism because he’s a fucking coward who dodged military service.
We were raised with “pride,” not necessarily racially or ethnocentric, but a broader sense that transcended such boundaries. I grew up in the 80s-90s in the midwest, and we were taught America was a “melting pot” of cultures, ideas, and races, and that we should look forward to a time when whites are not the majority because the lines will fall away, the average color will be brown as we all mix over the next generations, giving us less reason to fight. And we should look forward to it, because that’s been our story so far - broken, impoverished immigrants came here looking for opportunity, and found it through hard work and smart thinking, and then became a part of our shared tapestry. We were taught to be proud of this, that we were stewards of this tradition in the best, most advanced country in the world.
And now, well. The basest instincts of people have been brought to the surface and America now stands as an openly white nationalist, isolationist, fascist-tinged autocracy where the ideals I grew up with seem long antiquated.
So yeah hard not to feel ashamed of what’s happened to our shared identity in just a few decades.
Ain’t that the truth. We were supposed to be better than this and we were supposed to be improving
I feel that way but because I’m human.
I don’t have pride in my government or its actions.
It was actively causing a lot of harm for most of its existence and is now turbo charging its ability to enshittify the world.
The LEAST I can do is make it clear we’re not all in support of this shit.
Love the country and people though. Lots of cool forests to roam and lots of people who don’t suck.
I believe the shame stems from the moral injury we all suffer when we peacefully stand by in a democracy and let bad people control the government and inflict serious harm on innocents
So in some respect it is in fact all of our faults because we do in fact sit by and watch people die so we can respect the democratic process.
Anyone who has been embarrassed by a family member knows.
I’m just embarrassed as fuck
To the point of being furious…
Because it collectively is our fault.
There’s a huge difference between being ashamed of your Government’s actions and behavior and being ashamed of who you are/where you were born.
One is a valid criticism of the ruling class ignoring the people’s desire for peace and social responsibility. The other is a mental health issue.
I get attacked by people unable to make this conflation because I encourage people resistant to our government to pick up the goddamn American flag and wave it. Have some measure of pride in the institution you live in so others take it seriously when you demand improvement.
There’s a huge difference between being ashamed of your Government’s actions
That’s not really “shame”, not really the right word for it, shame is something you feel about yourself, this is more like resentment.
I think it becomes shame because we recognize we’ve benefited from the system that has shit all over so many. Even indirectly, it’s hard to think about all the ways I’ve benefited from - just to say one thing - all the cheap open land we got after putting the natives in concentration camps and murdering most of them.
Like, I try to enjoy a national park but then realize: this was someone’s home. Many peoples, in fact. We took it, put up gates, and charge people to harass the animals. And that’s the places we’ve saved from industrial pollution and factory farming.
I genuinely feel like a lot of people don’t think very much about their feelings or where they come from, and end up with really mixed-up or inconsistent values.
If you ask a lot of Americans why they feel the way they do about their country, negative or positive, they often become irritated or upset because most people just tie a lot of associations and emotions to other concepts and words. Which is fine, that’s how brains work. But I think if you’re involved in a democracy you should have some level of actual thought towards how you feel, what you want from your country and who should be representing those values. I can’t get people on either side of the political spectrum to care about any of that shit… which is why China will probably have the solar system in a generation.
Well this last election really broke me from thinking of myself as an American. I just happen to live here.
Because the truth is our democracy is managed by oligarch propaganda. And our votes mean very little outside of local elections.
A vote for Trump and a vote for Harris were both going to continue the harms of the MIC and the fossil fuel industry. Yes, Trump is an accelerant.
And I voted not to add gasoline. But the fire was going to burn one way or the other. Because that’s the wishes of Wall Street. And ultimately our vote means little.
I feel similarly and to expand a bit its more the fact that second time around electing this fool proves that that majority of Americans are either horrible people or useful idiots which is incredibly depressing to know with certainty. For me, first time around was a fluke, second time is reality. I’m exploring citizenship elsewhere as a backup plan.
With all of the attempts to dismantle voting booths and artificially mess with the results every freaking election, why even bother voting anymore?
It's like we tell the naysayers about voting as to why voting at all in America is pointless. But they still cling to some hope that they're heard. Well guess what? When a candidate can still win by Electoral College despite the popular majority, that alone tells you how little your little voices mean. When an election can be won by stupid points.
I don’t know about others but I imagine for a lot its just guilt by association. I’ve definitely been feeling it for a while.
I’m a citizen living in another country. I will NEVER FUCKING EVER call myself an American, much less a proud American. I’ll call myself a NYer because I owe most of who I am to that state/city, but I am ashamed about the country I grew up in.
One word:
Tribalism.
It’s shaming to see people and institutions you were proud of and bragged about being the best, then devolve into something the rest of the world laughs at.
Speaking only for myself: because the American government has, for 250 years, claimed to act on behalf of the American people. When it was liberating concentration camps and sending people to the moon, that was something to be proud of.* When it was upholding slavery and winking at Jim Crow laws, it wasn’t.
It’s a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” and so he purports to speak and act on my behalf. That’s deeply embarrassing and shameful, even if I couldn’t have done anything differently to prevent it.
When the rest of the world hates you for shit a minority of your country did, but succumb to generalized thinking and blame all Americans (looking at you, Europe), a guilt complex can be internalized.
Hating every American or having prejudices like believeng every American tourists are obnoxious is bad.
But saying you hate what “America” is doing is fair, because the Country is represented by your political class
I haven't felt very patriotic or proud of my country in over 25 years, since I began to slowly understand politics and how things worked within my country. I feel that after everything I've read, everything I've heard about, everything I verified myself by researching and everything everyone has gone through in it with the bads. You can say my control stick has been snapped off and I'm permanently unpatriotic and ashamed to represent my country, knowing the damage that has been done internally as a country and externally everywhere else in the world.
I know it's not my fault, I just do what I can, I pay my taxes knowing it's being pissed away, I work jobs I didn't like doing to feel like I'm contributing despite it not being ultimately worth it because I am helping sustain the motion of this unworthy country. I have voted Sanders, Sanders, Harris in my voting record. And still, the assholes won in the end. But then I feel like, that shit doesn't matter because our track record as a country has shown that the system is in favor of said assholes if they're cunning enough to take advantage of them and that's what we've witnessed many times.
All the while knowing that half of the population in this country, is dead set in taking the rest of us down with them in every negative decision made. While still trying to tell us it is our fault.
in my own case, it’s that I’ve (not intentionally but still) benefited from a system that subjugated others (natives, people of all colors, and women) to secure the national infrastructure I’ve directly profited from. Everything from education, clean water and housing, to medical care often shockingly focused on what ails and heals white males. And the sickening knowledge that the same ones who want to deport taxpaying workers who rarely benefit from the enormous amounts of money our country throws around are the same as me, living on land stolen from the people who lived here, who we basically exterminated. Finally, we use the trappings of a pseudo-democracy to declare all men are equal, but really, they mean wealthy heteronormative white men, because otherwise you’re the other and disenfranchisement should be expected.
That’s-just-the-way-it-is? only if you accept it.
My family settled here in 1630. I don’t feel shame about being american, I feel dread at the resurrgence of barbaric population control as opposed to compassionate capitalism and universal basic income for all. My entire childhood and participation in civics was a temporary era not the foundation of a beautiful future.
I look at my children and want to apologize to them for what they’ll endure after my demise. What a way to wake up…
American liberals would sooner say that the nation is impure than that nationalism is pathological. Many of them literally identify with the state as part of or representative of themselves. Guilt and shame are American rationalisation staples, “I feel bad, but I’m not going to stop.”
So for anyone keeping score at home:
This is exactly what OP is talking about. Instead of answering the question with anything even remotely resembling a nuanced take- we have instead, decided to make an uneducated blanket assessment of an entire group of people based on zero evidence and a lack of qualifications to make such an accusation.
For example, I am an American liberal. And everthing they said doesn’t even come close to describing my stance on the issues of nationalism or how I feel about my take on personal political representation.
But one should never let this get in the way of a good ol’ blanket statement! Because nothing says “no need to take anything I say seriously” any louder than this.
Jesus how dramatic. Please explain liberalism for me so that I know what I’ve gotten wrong here.
What a helpful and fair comment that is absolutely not dripping with smug self righteousness. So refreshing!
Did they fulfill their civil duty? Did they meaningfully fight to defend their cause?
If they fell short of their own expectations, they’ll feel shame.
Because I look at my country and what it’s done and feel insufficient for my failure to keep it from doing stupid and evil things.
Also the European and Canadian frustration with America and Americans is understandable, but it has an impact especially when you still think highly of those places and their people.
I’ve been watching the sopranos lately and the answer is because I’m secretly in the mafia and the Italians invented everything
Non parliamo con nessuno al di fuori della famiglia della nostra cosa
You have nuanced take on things. That’s a rarity here on lemmy. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if a few of the lemmunists show up to tell you how your take on China is entirely wrong.
And speaking of nuance- the overwhelming lack of it here is pretty much the answer to your question.
Strangely, people seem to hate when blanket definitions are used to describe them, while also seeming to love using them as a weapon against others when under the Manufactured Outrage spell.
I too voted for Harris, and I’ve been called a gEnOciDe suPpOrTeR, a bOoTLiCkEr, and. bLuEmAga™. Just for voting against a fascist.
Looking for a nuanced take here is like looking for it in a gradeschool classroom. It’s best not to take any of it seriously.
For instance, I too voted for Harris, and I’ve been called a gEnOciDe suPpOrTeR, a bOoTLiCkEr, and. bLuEmAga™. Just for voting against a fascist.
The hatred between left leaning Lemmy users over the last election is crazy to me. Instead of focusing on getting rid of the current fascist regime together, so many just dogpile on anyone based on whether they voted for Harris. I feel like every other political post has a flame war that starts with a comment blaming the news on anyone and everyone on the left who didn’t vote Harris or criticized dems during the campaign.
There are those of us with a bit of nuance though. I was and still am disgusted and disappointed with the Dem’s positions and empathize with those who sat out in 2024 but I voted Dems them over the party looking to fast track fascism and white nationalism. I regularly get flamed for suggesting we move on from blaming each other and focus on getting rid of the fascists here and now.
Yeah I get why people have talked shit to you. It’s flat out not fuckign acceptable to have withheld a vote from harris to make some stupid statement which will never be heard. What they did was see Hitler rising and said their little tantrum was more important than trying to stop him.
I think for some people the only way they can think of to help is attempting to bully someone over the internet, and it ends up applying to whoever happens to be around that disagrees with them, even though that makes zero sense as a strategy.
If someone calls you bLuE mAgA then that probably just means you are smarter than them.
That’s how I take it as well.
Honestly, in this situation it’s likely more performative than an actual feeling people have. It’s a good way to acknowledge that someone isn’t happy with the impact our country is having on the world.
I dont identify with my country. Im just a resource so they can collect taxes. I think their decisions are stupid and childish but its like watching babies trying to build a house.
Best you can do is to focus on your own life.
Best you can do is to focus on your own life.
Lol that’s why my parents say to me. That trying to change anything in politics is pointless, futile, that, in a hypothetical revolution, I’ll never get to live to see such a hypothetical victory…
I mean I kinda get it, my parents don’t want their kids to die in some war…
Direct action my friend. Unionize, participate in mutual aid, opt out of their economy as best as you can. Wars are won by supply chains, not by dead idealists.
Why is it not our fault? Shouldn’t we be responsible for our society? If you’re not responsible for your Society then what incentive is there to change it? We should feel guilty. America’s only the way it is now because we all failed.
thagoat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
It’s not shame so much as deep embarrassment for the current state of our country. We look like fucking morons on the world stage. Thankfully we will move on from this stage in our history, but the stain may remain for decades to come.
halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The only sort of solace to this, is that many other countries are clearly following the same path, so its not something inherent to just the US. Idiots are everywhere, and they vote.
Everyone is pointing to the US, but the same initial precursors are happening under their own nose.
West_of_West@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Canada has voted against the populist right for the last decade. And each time the Conservative party chooses some one more right wing. And each time they get a bit closer to winning.
Trump galvanized people last time, scared them away from the right. This time he seems to be inspiring the right wing politicians, and people live it.
I don’t know if we can hold out much longer.
QuinnyCoded@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
i hate when people shit on the US but don’t acknowledge any sort of solutions to put in their own country to avoid this situation
kernelle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
While agreeing for the most part, it’s painfully clear as someone in the EU how politics in the US empower far right rethorics everywhere else. While politicians in my country have condemned the actions of the US, the political landscape has shifted dramatically.
Everyone is pointing at the US because their politics trickles down into ours, not the other way around.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
False equivalency.
MangioneDontMiss@feddit.nl 2 weeks ago
Any idea when? I’m pretty sure I’ll be dead before I see it.
MangioneDontMiss@feddit.nl 2 weeks ago
yeah i never expected an answer to this.