Asklemmy

I'm pretty much done with this country. My plan is to get whatever education I can, then skip off to the EU for employment and not pay any student loans that I happen to rack up.

Pretty much. I don't see how we can fix what's wrong with this country from within the system. The US is fundamentally broken because we have lost any semblance of a shared reality. There are four distinct and incompatible realities fighting for dominance: MAGA, republicans, democrats, and leftists. All four groups believe in a different set of facts about the world we live in and let their fear and cruelty drive their actions. It's not sustainable.

I wish there was something we could do to reunite our understanding of the world we share, but it's too far gone now.

I'm not seeing much hope in the future, so yes I've given up. I want to leave so goddamn bad.

I'm going to start with one phrase of yours that galls me: "voted wrongly". There's no such thing. There's votes that you or others disagree with, but no such thing as a wrong vote. And as long as you keep going with the narrative that any vote against your preference is wrong, you're going to make more enemies in places and times when you need allies.

As far as my own hope? I don't know. I only know that some people who were prosperous before are suffering now, and that some who were suffering are now prospering. I'm sure it will keep going like that. So I don't know if it's hope, but rather comfort in the knowledge that nothing ever ends. Giving up isn't an answer I can accept, so I have to keep going and do what I can to build a future for myself and those I love.

I think we'll turn it around, though stuff like USAID is going to be difficult to bring back quickly. Institutions like NOAA will need to be rebuilt. There will need to be strong anti-corruption measures as well.

Yep.

Yes. I do not believe there is any chance whatsoever to make America great again, as we were 1 year ago.

Oh yeah. In 2020, when I saw how awful a huge part of my fellow citizens acted.

I know you're looking for people currently living there, but I left not long after Trump got elected the first time (coincidence, not cause), and I feel like it's helped me be a bit more objective about it.

I've seen my dad go from a die-hard conservative who makes a couple edgy jokes to someone who isn't even trying to hide his support for Trump. At best, he says that Trump's statements are overblown, at worst he supports them wholeheartedly. It didn't improve under Biden's term, and his behavior was one of the big reasons I feared a Trump victory in 2024. He felt no need to hide what he had before (that is, if he had it then. It could have grown over time as well). There was no reform coming for him, just deeper entrenchment.

On the other hand, my sister and Mom represent some of another segment of the US. Neither one follows politics because they're just busy. When they do have time to relax, the last thing they want to do is catch up on things they've missed. Unless my sister has something blasted across her social media feeds, she doesn't know about it. My mom just doesn't really watch anything at all, mostly because she's dealing with her own stuff.

I got to see the US change drastically when Trump got elected, with issues that affected literally everyone, and it turned out that part of my family ignored it, and the part that did know about it supported it. I know my immediate family isn't a representative sample of the entire US (hell, they're not even representative of my entire family), but seeing is believing. I never would have thought that people could be like this, but if this can happen to people I know, it's not that hard to see it happening to others.

So, yeah. Even assuming Trump peacefully leaves power in 2029 (I've got no hopes of removal from impeachment), that's four years of destroying good will, soft power, government services, and legal protections, and this is happening just after we had a president who, at best, could stabilize the country a bit before building back some of what was torn down in the four years prior. This time, the administration is moving faster and with more purpose in some of these areas, too. Assuming it takes twice the amount of time to completely rebuild all that the Trump administrations have removed, that's still 20 years down the road to be at par with where we were 8 years ago. Foreign countries don't trust the US to not elect a lunatic. It can be a normal country, some day, but not until I'm old, and not without a lot of internal changes I don't see happening yet.

i have given up. I mean, I had when I was a developing young adult and while I am in my mid 40’s now, it’s only embiggened my concerns. it’s taboo here on .world but I truly think the problem is the current era’s phase of capitalism’s expansion especially with the adaptation to technology in the last 50 years.

there was, truly, no time when this country was great; and I’d posit there is no time when any country is as they exist to extract and exploit.

there is no where to go.

so what I do and have done for 20 some odd years now is try to affect (effect??) change in my community. my “city” is like 14k people. I am a firefighter, first responder, and help where I can elsewhere when I see it. i vote. make my concerns known at town hall, especially against how much our PD is expanding due to “safety” horseshit. I help others vote, I mean to say help them realize they can, where to go, etc. I joke but am kind of serious too when I tell our selectmen that the reason I like supporting my small town is because we know where they live. They get the point with a chuckle and then ask for my votes.

Nope. America has been through all of these things before. It's why reading history gives me a lot of comfort.

I've never taken down on them to begin with

I've been saying for the past decade that I think the federal government holds way too much power and needs to dissolve. The country is too big for how centralized the power is and the states cannot effectively satisfy their constituents' needs when they're so beholden to federal interests. I love the state and city that I live in and I don't want to have to move across the world in order to live somewhere with sane politics but I'm sick of progress here being delayed because so many of our resources are going to the federal government and being compromised by the interests of the other 98% of the country.

Whenever I hear some famous American talk about how they weee gh good guys and that they want to be the good guys again...

You never were the good guys, its just now for the first time that Americans really too suffer the consequences of their shitty leadership.

The US funded and directed a dictator to come to power in Iran, which directly caused current theocracy

Same for Chile same for Nicaragua same for...

The US always has been the evil one, it's just that it was slightly less evil than the USSR and it gave it's citizens slightly more rights and it treated its allies well.

THAT is what's gone now. Allies are now treated like enemies, and citizens are now being fucked, and it's rapidly becoming more evil than the USSR ever was.

The US always has been evil

On a side note: Well controlled capitalism is great for everyone and can be the power source for a huge socialist system, see Finland, the Netherlands. Unbridled capitalism gets you the shit in the US. You were warned, ma y many times, you k ew this would happen and didn't care. That is what changed, now you have out of control billionaires. You have a choice: go like France a few hundred years ago, or become slaves. I'd you want to be a slave, that's fine, that's your choice, but don't force that fate onto the test of the world

I think, in politics like physics, every reaction provokes an equal and opposite reaction.

Obama, a calm, intelligent, “post-racial” president, provoked Trump, a talentless, deranged assclown.

Trump will in turn provoke an more belligerent left, as is already happening (DNC vice chair David Hogg earmarking 20 mil to primary centrist Dems, AOC potentially primarying Schumer, etc)

More importantly, business is waking up to the fact that having someone they can’t control in the White House is bad for them. Dems have the killer instinct of a soggy donut, which is why they lose so much, but CEOs do not. The hit pieces conservative publications put out during the tariff spat last month were brutal.

As to your specific points, I’m not sure people complain about commercials anymore given that most people stream, which has far less than traditional TV.

As for wages during the pandemic, they increased at the highest rate in 30 years for low earners, so there wasn’t much to complain about there.

Finally I’d like to point out that the international bed shitting, as you correctly put it, is almost exclusively a Republican phenomenon. Iraq and Afghanistan? Republican.

Vietnam? Started by a dem, but only because reps had poinsoned the well with the Red Scare and “they lost China” so that any weakness to communist was political suicide. Increased by a republican.

Support for Israel regardless of their behavior? Definitely both parties, but any complaints come from Dems.

Support for Ukraine in their fight for freedom? All Dems and very few reps at this point.

For those of us that are both angry and embarrassed at this president, his party and his people, we can’t help that, like Isaac Asimov put it, “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”. But we’re damn sure not gonna give up fighting back.