I was a teenager during 9/11, and watching nearly every adult in my life go absolutely stark raving mad from both fear and blood lust was a real wake up call for me, I can tell you that much. If you aren’t old enough to remember it there’s nothing recent I can really compare it to. 9/11 and the Iraq War are what really got Fox News off the ground, so just imagine living in Fox News land, because it was absolutely tapping into some primal response a lot of people had.
I had more or less the same experience. “Terrorists” were the villains in spy movies and they were NEVER in the USA. I thought we were invincible? Get a little older: oh look at the social services and infrastructure that other countries have for free.
I was in my early 20s and it definitely was a moment when I realized things weren’t what they seemed. I also fell for the narrative for a bit. Then a couple years later when it was revealed that the WMDs in Iraq were made up it started to all make sense. This country operates the highest, most advanced form of propaganda and corruption. It’s how it stays in power.
I also believe this is what Israel is going through now. Leveraging primal blood lust to justify what being committed. No wonder the US is supportive.
With each passing week, there are more and more parallels to the aftermath of 9-11. Israel has now even had its own equivalent to the leaked photos of prisoners (held without trial) being degraded, tortured, and sexually assaulted at Abu Grahib.
It’s depressing watching history repeat itself within your own lifetime, even despite the far greater visibility of Israel’s war crimes thanks to the internet.
I was a sophomore in high school, from a military (though pretty progressive) family. Both my grandfathers were sailors and my father went to West Point. I was in NJROTC and had every intention of going to Annapolis. I wanted to be an astronaut, so navy pilot seemed the path, and I would be making my family proud. I happened to be the one to put up the flag at school that morning. All of this is to say that I was very proud to be an American, and was looking forward to serving my country. The terror and confusion of that day hit me as hard as anyone else, but in the following weeks I was appalled to see how my fellow countrymen reacted. The way we reacted, with fear and hatred and overwhelming violence, both within and without, fundamentally changed how I saw my nation. I eventually dropped out of ROTC and started studying history and politics. I found punk music and took theater classes. I identified as social Democrat until the BLM riots of 2020, when I was radicalized. I now consider myself an anarchist.
It happened when I was kid growing up in another country, as a US citizen, and then coming to the US to see for myself why I had heard so much trash talk about Americans.
We are arrogant, spoiled, dumb and racist. The world expects us to be better. We are privileged like a spoiled rich brat and are waisting our fortune. We have what other countries do not and yet still ignore our own poor. We openly shit on our own minorities and immigrants that want to come here and build with us.
Even dirt poor countries have free healthcare and education. Our education system has been ignored and allowed to fall farther and farther behind the entire world.I came here in when I was in the 6th grade and immediately was shocked that kids my age could barely read. This is richest country on the entire planet, ever! Multiple choice? You mean they give you the answer and just mix it in with wrong answers!?
Our celebrated values that we put forward in our popular media (how the world learns about us by the way) do not include humility or compassion, it’s all direct or veiled celebrations of military might. Every hero is fighting. Guns guns guns, fight fight fight. Our military power allows us to do nearly whatever we want and we do.
Every disparaging comment I heard or that was aimed at me for being American I learned to be true. They are tired of our bullshit. The world doesn’t hate us, they are deeply disappointed in us. Several generations of disappointment.
Thank you for sharing this, it puts my feelings there well. I don’t hate America. I’m disappointed in it too. We used to do great things, but we’ve had generations who have squandered that, and here we are.
Yes, but I would also say that an entire generation isn’t responsible for everything. It’s usually a few very powerful people in that generation that get an the influence.
Perspective from a mid-twenties American. I realized it was horseshit during the 2016 Trump election.
I was turning 18 just in time to vote in this election, and it was right around then that I started forming my own ideas about politics and what political “side” I stood on. Like a majority people with a semi-functioning brain, I thought Trump was an actual joke, a meme that had no chance at actually winning, like how we were acting when Kanye ran. Unironically, I thought that having trainwrecks of a leader was something that “other countries” did, obviously America wouldn’t let someone like this win because even though we make little mistakes here and there like Iraq and slavery we’re still the good guys and we wouldn’t actually let a moron like Trump become our president.
When it became obvious that he was more than a joke and an actual serious candidate with high potential to win, I realized that the only people consistently talking about how amazing America was at everything were the people voting for him, and I started dissecting the things I’d taken for granted.
You think slavery was a “little” mistake?
As an aside, my autocorrect wanted slavery to be Disney and I was a little tempted to let it stand.
America is #1 in production of aircraft carriers. America is #1 in the number of incarcerated citizens per capita. America is #1 in the number of adults who think angels are real. America is #1 in defense spending.
For me it was when I was around 8 or 9 and met someone from Kenya. They could speak perfect English, wore normal clothes, and talked about having electricity. I’d literally never been told that those things existed in Africa - every reference to that continent only talked about tribes and jungles, save for Egypt which only talked about ruins and deserts. I asked around and found that most of the rest of the world has the same stuff we have, and most countries have a functioning government. I was so confused - why were we the country of freedom when everyone else has the same thing?
At the time I just assumed that there was something I was missing, or maybe the rest of the world just caught up to our idea, but eventually I came to the conclusion that they tell us we’re the country of freedom - and keep our studies of other countries to a minimum when we’re young - so that we can internalize the rhetoric that our country is the best before we find out that most other countries about the same, and often better in certain ways.
Just think which countries make their kids pledge alliance to the flag in schools.
