The American Mindset: Jingoism
A Message to the Harm Reduction Voter
None of you people are serious.
You pretend that Trump is some uniquely bad actor, but your actions and comments every four years are demonstrative of the unexamined jingoism core to the American mindset. You constantly make up excuses for American exceptionalism, expansion of its interests into the world at the cost of millions of innocent lives, under the guise of improving the world by spreading ideals you barely fight for at home.
And yet, without a shred of awareness, in the next breath, you call for those people you claim to care for, because they live under an oppressive government, to be subjugated or exterminated en masse when it's convenient to empire. In few other places in the world is it acceptable to state "X country and its people should not exist" but it is startlingly common for those words to leave American lips, the left and right alike.
"Palestinians are anti-LGBT, that's why it's okay for bulldozers to crush their homes and IDF snipers to fill babies' heads with bullets."
"Putin is anti-gay, that's why the US should invade them and destroy them as a country.”
In any civilized country it is unconscionable to express something so drastic, cruel and cold, but it is completely normalized in America. This country has spent the past century sticking its nose where it doesn't belong. Twenty years ago you people were criticizing Dubya for manufacturing a cause to start an illegal war in Iraq, and now because it's Democrats doing it, it's unreasonable to dissent.
At no point do you consider that it’s none of our business, that those people should have the self-determination to fight to improve their own conditions at home. At no point do you even consider that you might even be wrong because all the information you get about these places is second-hand, sourced from a language you don’t speak, from a country you know nothing about, filtered through institutions who have a vested interest in maintaining American hegemony.
At no point do you experience any sense of sonder, that these people whose lives you are weighing against your own also have lives, emotions, ambitions and struggles as complex as your own. They exist as one-dimenstional caricatures whose existence you candidly accept as competition to your own, based on the propaganda that’s fed to you, and you have the nerve to call yourself civilized.
America has appointed itself “leader of the free world” but has done nothing to demonstrate it is worthy of that title. In every domestic metric that matters America is behind its peers. It is perhaps the most aggressive country in history, routinely and illegally meddling in the affairs of other countries, protected by veto power in the UN, pre-emptive sabre-rattling if it’s ever held to account for its crimes, and a vast intelligence network to manipulate enemies.
And yet in spite of this, your core belief is that what America says goes, that anything it does outside its own borders is beyond reproach, and you will gladly reduce any complex situation down to the narrowest scope where its actions have plausible deniability. You are the nationalists and chauvinists you claim to oppose.
You are no different from Trumpers, but because the media echo chamber repeats this childlike, unevolved, partisan view of politics to you, and because the politicians you treat like celebrities "clap back" with patronizing sass when confronted with the atrocities they've committed, you feel this smug, self-righteous sense of unearned superiority like the callous narcissists you are.
Kamala responding to pro-Palestinian protestors in a Pennsylvania rally confronting her on her support for Israel committing genocide.
Palestine is proof that if you were alive at the time of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising you would have taken the side of the fascists because of how “unruly” the Jewish resistance was.
You bring out this doomer energy every four years, patting yourselves on the back for being the "grown up in the room" (who was born yesterday).
Where are you the rest of the four years between election cycles when you're browbeating people back into supporting empire? You're calling the police on protestors, complaining like Karens to your city councils when they want to build a homeless shelter, and otherwise doing absolutely nothing to contribute to the betterment of society.
You only crawl out of the woodwork every four years to make sure nothing changes, because that's what "lesser evilism" is:
Do not hope for better, do not try for better,
and if someone does, actively get in the way.
And you have the gall to call anyone else a contrarian.
“Lesser evil” is a more apt phrase than you realize — because you actually are evil.