No one should be proud of corrupt court systems and dictatorships.
We terrorize the world with the threat of military and corporate alignment. We are dragging the world across the point of no return on climate change. We have fewer and fewer rights here while funding genocides. Kids get shot up at schools on the daily while police do nothing. Oddly those same police murder more and more black and brown people each year. Rents are skyrocketing. Healthcare is a goddamn joke. Groceries are ballooning in cost It is commonplace for people to work two or more jobs.
WTF is there to be prideful about at the State level?
Do you mean ‘state level’ as in nation or like the individual states? No individual states are perfect, but a bunch of them are at least doing things you can be proud of at least in a discrete(as in disjointed from the whole) way if you can’t be proud of the whole state.
The State level, like the State Department. I capitalized the word for clarity.
Gotcha, that’s what I would have assumed, but felt like I wanted to ask. Can’t say I disagree with any of that, Federally the US is a mess and it’s why state differences can be so stark and go from places like California, a place that would have like the 5th largest economy in the world if it was it’s own country, to places like Missouri that has significant amounts of poverty that resembles developing world poverty.
Good.
The corruption began at least with Reagan and continued until it was cemented with Citizens United. Now a large portion of politicians are bought and sold useless, spineless con artists and so many idiot voters eat it right up.
How can I, a citizen of many decades, be proud of a country that allowed itself to devolve so easily and quickly?
Our elected leaders betray us for money like breathing, our wealth class uses their power to pillage our commons and coerce ever more exploitative labor using the government that was supposed to protect us from their power as their personal cudgel, and we basically hate one another due to the owner’s media propaganda machine intentionally keeping us divided and misinformed so we can never unite to challenge them.
What, you want we should rally around pride in our nation’s supposedly admirable history? The genocide parts, the slavery parts, non-crony capitalist foreign nation destabilization parts, the state sanctioned union busting parts, or the eugenics parts?
How about something from the last week of history, like making it legal to make it illegal for our fellow citizens to exist in public places without a home they can’t afford? Is that what we should take pride in? Demonstrating cruelty to the most destitute members of our society that we have all collectively already failed the most to feel superior and get them out of our sight?
Fuck this place. Yes there are other horrible nation states that thrive on inhumanity, but that in no way absolves us of ours, especially with all the inhumanity in the form of poison pill “free market advocacy” that our diplomats, military, and multinationals pressure other nation states to become to make them as greedy and sociopathic a society as possible and make their markets accessible for our egotistical capitalists to grow their dragon hoards with as the numbers of homeless Americans continues to explode.
