Yup, this presidency has killed my faith in our supposed system in record time. Congress's inaction and complicity were the final nails. I have no faith in this country or its people. Hard to not come to the conclusion that we're entirely motivated by greed and schadenfreude. We the people have the government we deserve.
Sure the government has been corrupted and hollowed out, but the people deserve some credit.
From Minneapolis Minnesota standing firm, building barricades in the streets, and bringing food to families to afraid to leave to folks in Portland directly engaging with frozen water cops, common citizens have shown they won’t roll over so easy.
I also just saw on Threads this morning (ick, I know) there’s a “warehouse fire tracker” that’s up to 90 now (!).
I think there are a lot of people and individual communities who are resisting Trump and deserve incredible credit, but it's accurate to say that this has shown the weakness in American society.
Right now, our social fabric as a country is really frayed. We have terrible safety nets. Our ability to get healthcare is tied to our jobs (some states now are trying to implement or have implemented work requirements for Medicaid, making even that now depend on employment). Many Americans are a missed paycheck away from losing housing. Our stagnating minimum wages are making it hard for a lot of people in fields with a lower barrier to entry to build up savings, and people in traditionally high paying tech fields are seeing the encroaching threat of AI. It's incredibly easy for employers to fire people in most places, with only a few protected categories that you can't be fired for, and those you'd have to prove in court against an employer in a lawsuit, needing either to find a lawyer who'll work on commission or pay up front in hopes of winning the wrongful dismissal suit, assuming you have the money for it in the first place.
Our housing supply has been badly outpaced by the demand for housing, and also large corporations are buying up swathes of housing to rent out to people at the highest rates they can get away with, while building new housing is expensive, often tied up in red tape, and rarely accessible to the average person as a result. Zoning in many places also locks people into specifically low density single-family homes, which are one of the most expensive and inefficient ways of building housing, making it harder for people to find starter homes and also making people dependent on cars, another expense that tends to put people in debt, worsen dependency on oil due to cars mostly being internal combustion and electric cars being more expensive, worsen public health for similar reasons (making healthcare access even more important, making people even more dependent on their jobs) and something which makes life even harder for folks who have a disability which makes driving impossible or requires expensive vehicle modifications.
Our food system is a mess. Many people live in food deserts where reliable access to fresh produce requires transportation long distances, and local options are mostly shelf-stable ultra-processed foods which do not fill most people's nutritional needs on their own. These foods are profitable for large corporations which use their influence to affect public health policy to keep people dependent on these foods, prevent regulation of potentially harmful ingredients, and bury studies that show the harms of these foods. Cooking at home takes time, energy, and access to affordable ingredients that people in food deserts working three jobs to keep the lights on often just do not have.
Public schools have often experienced funding cuts leading to staffing cuts leading to school lunch being prepared using limited fresh ingredients (particularly fruits and non-starchy vegetables), ultra-processed foods and minimum labor, often by third parties due to the lack of on-site kitchens, making it hard for schools to afford to change this if they want to. This may be the only meal a day kids from impoverished families get. If their parents have any problems with the paperwork for free school lunch and fall into lunch debt, these meals may be taken away from their child and replaced with a sunflower seed butter sandwich. The federal school lunch program heavily pushes dairy as well, so good luck to lactose intolerant kids, who might get a carton of soy milk instead but probably not. (Lactose intolerance rates are higher in African-American, Native American and Latine populations, of course.)
Public schools are frequently under-funded, and are funded primarily by property taxes for the school district, meaning that public schools in areas where people are already disproportionately impacted by poverty are going to have lower funds, contributing to lower quality school meals, fewer resources, fewer teachers with larger classes, and generally as a result less effective education. Private and charter schools may come in, but of course may charge for the education of their students (making it inaccessible to many), and often have substantially fewer regulations and anti-discrimination rules, allowing them to wield their power to effect desired agendas. Many are specifically religious and will teach their students according to the specific religious interpretation of those running it. Do they choose to interpret the Bible as forbidding same-sex relationships and identifying as anything but the gender you were assigned at birth? Fucking sucks for you, queer students!
And speaking of people pushing their preferred reading of their preferred religion from a position of power, we have lost huge amounts of third places, such that for many people, their only real available third place for in-person socialization is their local church. Don't share a religion with most of your neighbors? Sucks to be you. Differ in interpretation of a shared religious text from your local church? Sucks to be you. These churches have an outsized influence on local communities, and in many rural and predominantly white places in the US, they are pushing a specific version of white Christian Nationalism passed down from the top by influential rich folks who subscribe to those beliefs. And because of the gutting of social safety nets, a lot of local churches or religious organizations are the main option for seeking assistance with things. Trans? Muslim? Good luck with your local Salvation Army and their discriminatory policies.
I could go on long enough to write a damn book. Social media created by billionaires, optimized to be addictive and lock people in to their services even as they enshittify, have become one of the few other options for socializing, and are constantly pushing misinformation that serves a fascist Christian white nationalist agenda. Journalistic sources both local and national are being bought up by billionaires turning the reported news to their own agenda. Public funding for scientific research is being cut, leading to scientists relying on private grants to continue their research, allowing -- surprise surprise -- billionaires to exert outsized influence on who gets to practice science and what they research. Municipalities are collapsing under the financial weight of inordinately expensive car-centric infrastructure that they cannot afford, leading to them cutting more services and municipalities with predominantly impoverished residents especially struggling.
I barely even touched on the ways that sexism, racism, ableism, anti-queer discrimination, xenophobia and our broken migration system (broken in the sense that under-resourcing of immigration courts and absurd laws make it a long and difficult process for migrants to obtain legal residency and citizenship, leading to many migrants being left without documents and thus vulnerable to exploitation and further targeting by ICE) amplify these things and make them worse, nor how they divide people and make working class solidarity more difficult, nor how Imperialism and the Imperial boomerang affect things, nor our police system that actively incentives officers to act in harmful ways and prevents accountability, nor a million other things because everything is just too damn much. I literally forgot to even mention the US making war on Iran! Oh, the Epstein files! Voter suppression and gerrymandering!! Gun violence!!!
So frankly, it is a Goddamn miracle that despite all of this, people are organizing. It is a testament to the resiliency and endurance of humanity that Minnesota is organizing against ICE. It is beautiful that people are organizing national strikes, and that the numbers are slowly growing. It is heroic that people are forming mutual aid groups and building local power and building food and housing security.
I won't say there aren't a lot of American people who suck. People voted Trump in, twice, and many of his voters are actively celebrating his cruelty, while the remainder are like "oh, I didn't like the cruelty, but I thought he would be good for the economy," which, okay, "I'm only overlooking The Horrors because money!" isn't much of an excuse. A lot of working class Trump voters have been shaped by webs of disinformation and targeted manipulation that make them vote against their own interests, and I have a sliver of sympathy for that, but actively choosing to support or ignore the horrors being inflicted upon the vulnerable by this government is simply bad. They are choosing to do bad things.
So yeah, some of the American people do suck. But it's not most of us. Our society is broken, and it's going to take incredible work to fix it. So I don't see "the weakness of the American society has led to this" as a damnation of our people nor a downplaying of what so many are doing to fix it; I see it as a descriptor of the problem, in hopes of helping realize the solution.
Anyway, thank you for coming to my TED talk. Support your local mutual aid network. Start a garden. Advocate for housing reform in your community. Do something so that you know you are a part of the solution, and do not try to do everything, because you will burn out and this can only be fixed by rebuilding our society as a group, not a single individual fixing everything.
Also, if anyone knows how to do a "read more" block, please tell me? I'm using Voyager and don't see it built in, and the Markdown implementation for collapsed text blocks varies across every implementation I've seen.
What you are seeing is the end result of a fifty year long class war against the middle and working Americans that the rich have waged, and won.
Warren Buffet was making this known two decades ago and no one listened.
Longer than that, I'd say. The rich have been screwing with the lower classes since the country was founded.
The rich have been screwing with the lower classes since the advent of money. Point me to a time in world history where those with money and power didn't abuse the rest of us. The problem with hierarchical systems is the worst people always end up rising.
I claim that the bugs living in your stomach would consider you a compassionate and wise ruler if they could think. You eat food, they convert the food into shit and usable nutrients, and then you dispose of the shit. It's a win-win relationship for both parties.
They control our thoughts way more than you’re considering.
Ever get “hangry?”
Democracy at work.
Here is the demand: eating a meal. A succulent Chinese meal. This is democracy manifest.
This is not the first time though. The reason the 50s were considered a golden age for the middle class is because after the great depression we showed them who is the boss and taxed the shit out of them. We need to do it again, and frankly we need to go beyond posting on Facebook, Instagram, tiktok and other crap.
Those sites exist to keep us in disengaged.
And distrust of one another! Don’t forget that important motivation
Congressional Democrats shut the government down for a record length of time in refusal to fund ICE.
There are a million other things they didn’t do, but they did do this one thing.
To assume that humans en masse are weak is quite foolish, but I suspect their intent is more prodding for people to 'do something'.
We're aware of the issue most of us didn't cause. Just as other countries are currently dealing with their own artificially placed authoritarians (à la epstein and bannon).
To attempt change in the public eye immediately puts you in danger and as such is unwise. Furthermore, many people are not made for such things.
Eventually there will come a time for most of us where a normal life cannot exist, but it's a slow burn, not an explosion.
We need to put this into perspective and compare it to how Hitler turned an entire country into dumbly complacent followers & murderers & enablers. We look back at that and ask, "Why didn't somebody stop him? Why was everybody following his orders?"
Well yeah. It takes violence to stop violence, and we've been brain washed in schools with the "Zero Tolerance Policy" that retaliating is worse than being a bully. Kids who defended themselves from aggressors often were either the only ones punished, or punished far worse than the instigator. That's been going on for at least 2-3 decades in said schools. It has obviously made a bunch of adults too afraid of doing the right thing.
It's why we hold parades instead of protests with the threat of escalation. If we really wanted to make changes, Republicans and their minions(ICE) would not have homes to live in, or comfortable lives. Same for their enablers.
We would have taken them off the board and held special elections as populace. Still can, and will still need to when we have finally had enough. That or a foreign power will do it for us, but then they get to make the rules instead of "We The People".
You're very much on the right track, but I think it goes much much deeper than violence. It goes to self-reliance.
Go back to the time of the Framers. If you wanted something to happen, literally anything at all, you had to do it yourself. Criminal stealing your shit? By the time you get to town to ask for help he'll be gone, so either say goodbye to your shit (and maybe your wife too) or grab your rifle and confront him. Government not doing what you want? Grab your pitchfork and head to City Hall, or run for office yourself. Feeling hungry? Better start cooking. Want to have meat this winter? Better start raising a cow today. Bully picking on you? Better learn to fight his ass. Your house is broken? Better grab a hammer and a saw because nobody else's gonna help fix it.
Over the last 100ish years, that attitude has been slowly changing. Individual self-reliance has given way to a sort of mutualist service society where self-reliance is no longer the norm, it's no longer the exception, it's become almost an outlier.
Criminal stealing your shit? Call the police and hide until they arrive. Government not doing what you want? Write a letter or whine about it online. Feeling hungry? Grab your phone because food's an Uber Eats order away. Your house is broken? Call a repairman or a carpenter.
What's missing there? Any kind of self-reliance, self-empowerment to solve your own problems. Every problem involves asking or paying someone else to fix it for you.
I argue that the result of this is a society of people who've forgotten that they DO have the power to solve their own problems.
I don't blame malice for this, I blame a combination of laziness along with a LOT of well-meaning people and policies that only further disenfranchise the populace from their own agency, usually in the name of safety. You mention zero tolerance for bullying, that's certainly one as it teaches the victim not to fight back. Police say the same thing though- police always say if confronted with a threat just give the criminal what they want and run away when you can.
There's pockets of resistance to this sort of attitude, but they are largely isolated and focused on their own agendas without real connection. The most obvious might be gun owners and the concealed carry movement. But there's plenty of others- the open source community, the right to repair movement, the maker community, the free range parenting movement, and just about any other DIY community. They're all focused on their own individual niche, but the attitude is the same-- you CAN do ____ yourself, you DON'T need someone else to do it for you.
We need more of that. And I think it starts with school curriculum. If I was in charge, I'd take one academic semester out of high school (or at least a few credit hours) and devote it to purely empowering and constructive practical lessons. Wood shop, auto repair, plumbing/electrical, coding, cooking, industrial design, financial planning, etc. I don't think this should be optional electives to bypass, I believe these lessons are just as important as reading writing and maths, because if we create kids that are book smart but life stupid, we're doing them a disservice. And that's what we're doing now.
For our society to find our way out of this, we (the population) need to empower ourselves, recognize that we are NOT helpless, and take back agency over our lives.
Unfortunately I think that won't happen until either a. a real leader comes along who can energize people- think Obama before his first term, but with actual balls to FIGHT rather than watering everything down. Bernie could have been that. But I think we need another MLK type person. Or b, things get a good bit worse, for the population to stop desperately trying to stay afloat in a rigged game and instead doing a table-flip rejection of the rigged system.
Everything you have written here, I agree with. I think the self-reliance or even community reliance is what's missing here. That service reliance is a big factor in our learned helplessness.
It truly is just a giant mess, with many confounding factors. I hope others take the time to read what you wrote.
If everyone just stayed home for a few days and consume no media, with a full internet blackout in protest, all the rich people would get in line. Just unplug your router and don’t buy or consume anything.
Take sick days at work if you have to.
Sure, some get a bump from the supplies getting bought beforehand, but the majority would be in instant panic mode.
None of their fancy projections can handle that.
Edit(2): don’t not doing. Or not out
What's great is it doesn't even require everybody (which is basically a non starter since some would disagree with the protest).
I can't remember where so someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but even just a 10% general strike would have a noticeable impact.
Stop him? American society created him.
Not really sure how to fix this.
Yeah the analysis has to start with the fact that a majority of American voters chose this.
Could we say that technically Australia created him? Rupert Murdoch is the devil.
Rupert Murdoch gave up his Australian citizenship.
Since 1985, he's 100% US. He's all yours.
He's also not some kind of mind-controlling supervillain. He was saying things that the people were happy to latch onto and wanted to believe.
I don't understand why people are acting like half the country didn't want him. Present them with any other option and they will still choose him even today.
Edit: To those who keep discussing how people didn't vote, please realize that is still a choice. If you didn't vote then you may as well have voted for him regardless.
Im still trying to figure out how people like you think half the population voted for him. He won a plurality, which means more than his opponent. A majority is over 50%.
Only <65% people of voting age even voted (including 3rd party candidates). He didnt even win a majority amongst only those who voted. And who of the remaining 35%+ is fascist or anti-fascist? They're pretty vocal, now.
Any other option lmao. Dude, he's the least popular president in history. What are you huffing?
Regardless of supporting someone who attempted to overthrow our government, he is surrounded by convicted rapists and pedophiles. Why would he do that?
Regardless of his fascination with dictators and his love of rapists and pedophiles, his Iran war BS is being used explicitly for stock market manipulation. Presidents are not allowed to manipulate the stock market for profit. They actually have some pretty specific rules about what kind of money they can gain, use, and their possession of property is typically very scrutinized for a variety of reasons.
A rapist and pedophile loving, dictator admiring, stock market manipulating, genocide supporting and threatening, wonderful president.
Let me ask: Who won in 2020?
But Kamala wanted to eat babies (Palestinian babies at that!) she wanted to grab every single Palestinian by the neck and personally strangle them. I couldn’t be bothered to vote for her because nothing would be different right now! Biden was senile and I insisted they changed the candidate. When they did, I just knew Kamala would start a war with Iran! I am just glad I stayed home and let things spiral out of control. Any day now things will get better thanks to me staying home!
— some idiots here who I am more and more convinced are bots or paid trolls.
When can you ever push back on the DNC for being unable to put forward a good candidate?
If you talk about primarying any DNC candidate they kick you out of the party
Big if true. Like, enormous if true.
The problem is that the executive branch has too much power. Congress should have a committee of scholars convene and propose laws that would balance the powers of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The laws would be forwarded to Congress for debate and implementation as they are proposed.
Doesn't work when one side says scholars are literal enemies and traitors. Sorry.
Democrats can use this against Republican candidates running for reelection. Just say this candidate voted against this proposed reform and say what the reform is.
I don't think this is quite so true. If the only thing the resistance did to win back power was grab the presidency, that still wouldn't be nearly enough. Trump and his body of oligarchs managed to corrupt the DOJ, the special counsel, the supreme court, an entire political party, and more. It is a machine far beyond one person that prevented the checks and balances on him.
I'm open to people's suggestions for how to improve the three branches, but I'm sad to say, even when such suggestions bring up "a special commission, a voter-approved team of judges, a friggin' AI", there's no absolute means to say that group won't be either corrupted by special interests through insidious means, or completely ignored when their time comes to act.
Possible reforms I can think of are limit Supreme Court judges to 6 year terms. After that they would have to be reappointed. The President cannot issue pardons. Non-Supreme Court judges would be appointed by a bipartisan congressional committee which would choose a pool of candidates for a certain position. From that pool one would be chosen randomly. Congress must approve of all military action. The exception is when an immediate response is required. Then congressional approval would be required ASAP.
I'm sure a committee of scholars can think of more reforms.
There’s been multiple assassination attempts in his first year of this administration
Last I checked all of those people were right wing chuds. Make of that what you will.
No? Two were Ukraine guys, pretty much centrist liberals. One was all over the place
I didn't know "Ukraine guy" was a political position.
Support of US support of the Ukrainians in the Russo-Ukraine War. Both Routh and now Allen had documented public statements of that - https://thepostmillennial.com/exclusive-whcd-shooters-bluesky-posts-revealed-aggressively-anti-trump-jd-vance-pro-ukraine
Realistically, Trump hasn't done much that negatively impacts my life. Due to a reduction of overtime tax and his executive order on marijuana, my life has marginally improved.
The only thing the Democrats have done to improve my life in the last decade was to give me a bunch of money during the pandemic, but it's hard to say if that helped me in the long run. The resulting inflation was a pretty big catch.
lol, I guess you don't buy anything that that's imported and carried on a vehicle that runs on oil products.
If your material conditions were your primary concern the president passing an illegal regressive tax should've been a red flag. In my life Bush and Trump started wars while cutting taxes.
To me the dead giveaway is the new deal era coalition. The economy failed so it created an ideology antithetical to conservatism and the results speak for themselves.
fraid so. tv and electronics in general have led to a society of couch potatoes only suitable for mashing and smothering in butter and chives
Is that actually true?
Or is it a scapegoat to disguise the impact of over policing and the massive incarnation rate?
the "over policing" could've been a nonissue if there had been sufficient resistance and proper accompanying legislation to curb it and enact better training programs for cadets. scapegoats can be named to anything one chooses depending on which side one sympathizes with, but for my own part i see no scapegoating beyond that thst the executive branch has instituted
Not helplessness. Cowardice.
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