Americans were unused to the news happening to them. They hated the news happening to them during the pandemic, and thus voted to make it 2019 again by science or magic. And now the news is going to happen to them again very badly.
Yeah the all-too-common American trait to look at decline and go, "this isn't real. The past was worse, and the present is better than it appears and functions. Because it Must Be So" is toxic at the best of times, but its a weight around the ankles when we need to be agile in times like these
American exceptionalism is a core part of the magical-thinking worldview that @kurtandersen.bsky.social wrote about in his landmark 2017 book "Fantasyland".
I guess it’s less that it changed everyone’s lives (if you didn’t lose a loved one in the attack) than it’s another example of us not reacting in a sober manner to the news happening to us.
Even though it wasn’t an attack that had any personal relationship to people outside of the NYC metro and DMV, it was a psychological attack on all for disrupting the notion that violence was something that the US did on its own terms, something that happened in “the rest of the world.”
I have always considered 9/11 to have proven that Americans are cowards. It was tragic for sure but it was exactly one set of buildings and 3500 people, a zillionth of a percent. The Kevin Bacon number on the dead and injured was distant. Yet, everyone cried as if their momma hadn't kissed a booboo.
As an American this still baffles me. How can any American think we are exceptional. We have had it pretty soft for a long time but now Sleezer Drumpf has opened up a pandora’s box of pain.
People hate hearing about this. It’s bizarre to me. Fingers in ears. If a coup is happening somewhere else, totally acceptable water cooler talk. Here? Chicken Little.
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