• RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Does anyone think it’s a shithole? Maybe if you’re truly poor or a political wingnut on the fringes.

    The real issue IMO is that there’s a subset of the population that seems to think America is The Greatest Country On Earth™️, bar none, and gesture randomly in every direction but end up trying to shove the flag up your ass and equating the ability to bomb impoverished foreign countries to a marker of that greatness.

    Meanwhile, disparity is wildly increasing, evangelical, right wing theofascists are trying to turn it into a dictatorship/wannabe Russia, Americans are being eaten alive by educational, housing, and medical costs, overrun by functional monopolies, and objectively fare worse in many, many social, health, and economic markers when compared to the rest of the civilized world including upward mobility. Upward mobility being huge as its part of the American Dream™️ in which you allegedly can be anyone you want to be, but in fact countries outside the US offer better chances of changing your station than the US does. Depending on where you live in the US (particularly the south) there is better than a 95% chance your life will never get better. Butwhatabout-ing and saying look how much better off we are than, say, Venezuela isn’t a marker of success, measuring how far you are from the bottom isn’t the same as trying to climb to the top.

    So no, the US isn’t a shithole, but if someone is gonna start waving a flag and saying without qualification how great it is here the speaker shouldn’t be surprised when people cover their asses and say hell no it isn’t.