General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Anybody else no longer love this country? Hesitated to post, but gotta get this off my chest. [View all]The Velveteen Ocelot
(115,070 posts)and our history is full of terrible things that we don't like to talk about, like slavery and genocide and discrimination and oppression. I think those bad things have festered for a very long time, at least in part because we (by "we" I mean mostly privileged white people) got away with those things and we internalized them. As a country we became prosperous because we stole the land of Native people and the labor of enslaved Black people. But we don't like to think about that because it was terrible and we got away with it. We have gotten away with so many bad things that we think we are entitled to keep doing them without recognizing how bad they are. So we enable a government that refuses to help the poor, that refuses to educate its children, that refuses to treat its sick, and we keep getting away with it as long as we can make ourselves believe that those others deserve what happens to them and we aren't responsible.
When I was in grade school learning American history in the late '50s/early '60s we were taught about "Manifest Destiny," the idea that American settlers in the 19th century were entitled to the land they took from Native people, who didn't deserve that land, because the settlers were destined by God to remake the continent for themselves. All we learned about slavery was that it was bad but Lincoln freed the slaves so it's all fine now. We were fat, dumb, happy little white kids who believed America was the best country in the world and we were therefore the best people in the world because that's what we were taught, even if not in so many words.
It took the Vietnam war to make me start realizing that most of what I'd learned about our history was bullshit. And the older I get the more I understand that we are not such hot shit after all. It's been a process of great disillusionment to compare what we should be to what we are.