• Franklin@lemmy.ca
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    16 hours ago

    I’ve been asking myself since i turned old enough to vote, what the fuck happened to America’s collective spine?

    • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
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      16 hours ago

      Another big part is that Americans have been taught that protesting is the only valid method of affecting change. Our history books spend a lot of time talking about MLK’s peaceful protests. It totally glosses over all of the violence and angry mobs that were the other side of the same coin. My history book in high school only had the Black Panthers as a footnote.

      The government has a vested interest in not teaching Americans that violent protest is effective. It’s like the history books cover the American revolution, and paint the revolutionaries as proud patriots who were justified after dealing with an oppressive monarchy. And then there’s a hard pivot towards “oh and also violent protest is never okay, and you should just chant at your local park instead.”

      Hell, look at the comments sections of any protest coverage, and you’ll see people blatantly stating that they’d make a point of running over protestors who blocked a highway. There are plenty of people who fully believe that protest is only supposed to be directed at the government, and should never inconvenience the citizens.

    • shorap@lemm.ee
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      16 hours ago

      Died a while ago unfortunately. The realization for me was when they dems rolled over for W after the steal in Florida tho the weakness of the dems was present before even that.

    • Allonzee@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      We sold our collective spines for the confidence scheme lie of oligarch urine raining down on us in the 80s.

      We surrendered the class war with no terms, and have been living under class occupation ever since. Many to most Americans still defend that surrender even here at the end rather than admit the capitalists successfully played them for fools and got them to vote for their own desperation.

      The Ronald Reagan Jack Welch confidence scheme was the end of the United States, it’s just taken this long for a meaningful number of people to be willing to admit that we were and continue to be conned into giving away the store for not only nothing, but our own destruction. Unrestricted capitalism always leads to fascism, it is its natural goal and conclusion, a captured zombie government that exists solely to further the short term profit of big business, scapegoating using for profit media and captured political pulpits to blame the powerless without such pulpits for the capitalists sociopathic, avarice driven malice.

      Citizens United was just pissing on the nation’s already long dead corpse.