The following is largely an emotional reaction. It contains references and direct mentions of controversial topics. Please consider this a trigger warning, but maybe also a cry for help. This is all I have left, so I'm using it to reach out and try to find something worth while.
I'm honestly wondering what it is we're supposed to be protecting any more.
Having service in the military, I can tell you that there are a lot of reasons our military is one of the best, if not the best, in the world. There's also a reason why our military is generally a better culture than the average among the whole of the nation. Is it perfect? By no means, not even close. We keep allowing high ranking officials to forget who they're supposed to be protecting and then we get rapes and murders like what happened to Spc. Guillen. Yet, I can see why we might want to preserve the progress made in the military, but what for?
Our international policy is a joke. We have multiple treaties, some of which we allowed to be forced on us by the UN despite having veto power, where our government is responsible for the military and economic welfare of other nations, receiving close to nothing in return. Look up the Compact of Free Association (COFA), which makes us responsible for three other nations, gives their citizens full access to the USA including services normally reserved only for our citizens, no tariffs, military and economic support, and we are held legally responsible if anything happens to them, but if we were to be destroyed they would be left unscathed. What do we get in return? The right to negotiate for land for military bases. We're not even guaranteed that much. And all that is for some tactical advantage in an area of the world that we haven't bothered with since Viet Nam, and frankly a lot of people believe we shouldn't have bothered with it there. Do we even need bases to get that tactical advantage? Our ships can stay at see, self-contained, for months, just hanging out. They produce their own power, they use hydroponics and can receive supplied via air drop, why do we need bases out there?
We have at least one state and one territory where a significant portion of their population wants to no longer be part of the United States. I'm speaking of Hawaii and Puerto Rico. Both have significant movements within them that call for independence and free association, the same kind of agreement we have through COFA. And the thing is, if we don't grant those demands, we're painted internationally as evil colonial powers. If we just granted them full independence, pulled out all citizens that wanted to remain U.S. citizens and then left those nations to their own devices, we'd be viewed as monsters. So we're required, by international law and sentiment, to give to other nations with no real promise of return. Why?
Then let's look at the domestic picture. Our nation is so divided right now thanks to the reincarnation of McCarthy creating the inevitable peak caused by literal decades of idiocy from both major parties that we literally risk armed uprisings no matter who wins in November. We already have shit-tons of unrest, for damned good reason, going on all over. Do I support burning down buildings or even peaceful protests without clear demands? No, not under any circumstance, but any student of sociology or history can tell you that such a reaction was inevitable without the changes being demanded, changes that are being characterized as anarchist, chaotic, or unreasonable. We're not talking about destroying all law enforcement, we're talking about treating their violations of the law the same as ours, especially when those laws differ. Why is it that a civilian is "innocent until proven guilty" inside a jail cell awaiting trial if they can't come up with the money to pay bail even for non-violent crimes, but a police officer who violates due process by punishing someone with 9mm rounds gets a paid vacation until it can be proven that they did something wrong? Hell, give the police officers special holding areas, their own damned building, but put them in the same situation as someone awaiting trial for homicide in which they'll be pleading self defense.
That's not even the worst of it. There are wildfires eating up multiple states right now, and the federal government is barely responding because 45 wants one of those states to "clean up their act" before they'll send any aid to that state for the wildfires.
That brings me to a sentiment I see from both political extremes: "let it burn" or "burn it down." From the right, the best example is the response to Kenosha, where because a single police officer was assaulted with a brick, their proposed solution is to "let them burn down their own city." One criminal act and suddenly no one in Kenosha deserves basic law enforcement services, access to firefighters, etc. And on the other side it's the entire nation! Literally! "Burn it all down" is a slogan because injustice is still a thing. Injustice will always be a thing, the point is to keep fighting to fix the injustices we see now so we can fight new injustices in ten years. Our system allows for that, at least, but we're not unique in that, almost any constitutional government with a democratic mechanic has that ability.
Is the U.S. the greatest country in the world? No. It hasn't been for a long time, if it ever was. Our economy is trashed, our educational system is all but completely broken, our citizenry are so indoctrinated that they consider experts to be experts only if they agree with their preconceived notions, our international policy is often oppressive and when it's not it sometimes is just cowardly (see: our actions in Syria). Our history is far from clean as well. We were built up on the backs of slaves and wading through the blood of Native Americans. Until the 1950's, which is that long ago, we had overt discrimination on the basis of sex and race in our laws, and even today we have overt discrimination on the basis of other protected statuses in our laws, on top of the functionally discriminatory laws and policies.
Would I describe us as a racist nation because of all of that? No, I would describe us as a nation. No nation with a significant population of multiple races, ethnicities, or even creeds is without the same kinds of discrimination, and often very similar history. Canada, the supposed bastion of justice in North America, is the only nation in which the word "Eskimo" has been so often used to oppress, demean, and harm their Native population that it has to be treated as a slur, much like how our nation must treat the N-word. (I apologize to any who are offended by my spelling out that term, most Americans would not know what "E-word" meant without me spelling it out). The UK still has problems of hate crimes, some of them not even considered hate crimes because of archaic laws. And I shouldn't have to explain why the histories of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East have the same black marks on them as ours do, even in relatively recent times. So, no, unless we're willing to admit that all humanity is racist, our nation isn't any more racist than another. Does it have racial prejudice in the very systems meant to stop that? Yes, very definitively yes, and we have literal volumes of evidence to prove that, but that leads to my next complaint.
We're so focused on the specific categories of oppression we see or experience that we, the generally oppressed, fight among ourselves over who is the most oppressed, rather than actually addressing the problem as a whole. Great example is police brutality: that is not a racial issue. There is a huge racial element to it, of that there is no doubt, but it is an issue that affects every race, ever ethnicity, and every creed, at least below a certain socioeconomic status. Rather than doing what Campaign Zero has done and focus on the problem and evidence-based solutions to that problem, we fight over who has it the worst, and try to justify some of the brutality because it happens to other people too. It's really clear who that benefits, and it's not any potential victims of police brutality, it benefits those that are nowhere near likely to experience it, who benefit from all of the forms of oppression present in our society. The different categories of oppression, racism, ableism, sexism, homophobia, etc. etc. ad nauseam serve to make it so that those that benefit from oppression can have the oppressed to their oppressing for them. Want to keep all poor people down? Convince them that some of the poor people are inherently different from others of the poor people and that difference makes then alien, an enemy, or straight up wrong to exist. And that doesn't stop at race, ethnicity, or protected statuses, they do the same thing with ideologies. Why have we not generally come to recognize that the concept of "identity politics" is literally there to convince all the poor people that anyone who disagrees on a single point of sociopolitical policy is evil? Not pro-life? You're a satanist who loves to kill children. Not anti-racism? You're a Nazi. How is that not obvious to the vast majority of our nation?
I woke up this morning, just looked at what was going on, and legitimately thought to myself, "let it burn." Why? Because despite the fact that I sacrificed everything I had and more for this nation, I have a hard time seeing what's worth saving. And maybe that doesn't just apply to my nation, but to pretty much the entire English-speaking world, because the same problems present here seem to be present all around there.
If you've made it this far, thank you. I'd like to ask one more favor of you: please tell me something that's worth saving here. Please share with me a reason why I should continue to strive and sacrifice for this nation that seems so hopeless to me. I know it's not fair to ask, but I've run out of my own hope, and I could really use the help.
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