Europeans don't, maybe sometimes can't, understand the absolute crushing pressure and gaslighting that most Americans are put through to make us the way we are.
It's a decades long effort to turn most of the population into a money and power pump for a tiny elite class, all while grinding us into dust.
We're crazy and scared all the time, and have no idea what's going on in the rest of the world.
There's a reason dying of opiates seemed like a rational choice to a lot of people.
@quinn Americans also often don't travel within our own country.
One of my current neighbors thinks she would need pepper spray to travel abroad and she's disinterested in traveling more than a state or two away from home. She's so extremely angry but the other neighbors are so sweet to her. The fear has her trapped in this small corner of life and the smallness of her life has her angry, resentful, and clingy.
Folks have ideas about the other states informed by tv and news.
@quinn The broader world is as foreign to many Americans as California is to Florida or Utah is to New York.
Its an important part of understanding and facing our challenges.
Most folks aren't so different but the belief that they are makes them coil up into tiny worlds and tiny lives, fearful of every possible source of joy and thus angry at every possible theft of joy that's within that tiny worldview.
@cwicseolfor @clarablackink @quinn I was told that I "was getting above my station and needed to learn a few lessons."
I told my relatives that it was a conference for work when I lived in DC and suddenly that was okay.
Quinn Norton
ClaraBlackInk
The Doctor
cwicseolfor
moondog548