As an outsider (I live in Belgium) it feels very weird and dystopian to see everything happening in American politics with Trump and Musk.
On one side, it’s very interesting and almost entertaining; on the other side, it’s scary. I can’t imagine what it must be like to live in the USA.
Americans, how do you cope? What’s your take on the situation?
Try living it. As an American citizen, I have never lived with such a high level of stress and anxiety in my entire life. I am a lifelong student of history (I have a degree in a branch of history), and I KNOW where the kind of government we have now leads, and there are NO positive outcomes for the majority of Americans. Frankly, I don’t think the potential outcomes will be good for the Sociopathic Oligarchs either, but they are too blinded by their sick obsession with greed and money to see it.
I don’t see us getting out of this without violence.
I am trying to ignore it. It’s like all the worst fears I could have coming true. The richest man in the world, a naked fascist and virulent transphobe, is gobbling up all the sensitive data the government has and is feeding it to AI so he can tear down the government and usher in techno-feudalism.
Meanwhile, I still have to go to work and pretend that everything is fine and normal, while the government is trying to define trans people out of existence, help Israel ethnically cleanse Palestine, and threaten every ally we’ve had.
I want to leave, but it’s extraordinarily difficult to uproot your life, and there’s no guarantee that finding a viable way to move elsewhere is going to happen.
So I’m just trying to imagine myself as a tiny individual, trying to hide from the brutality and eke out a good life with my little resources and community, and pray that whatever happens doesn’t happen to me directly.
Maybe I should be out protesting - I feel like I should - but there isn’t a mass movement right now, and there’s no leverage in government to stop them. So things are feeling pretty bleak right now.
but there isn’t a mass movement right now
Lookup the 50501 movement. There were protests across the entire country in every single state yesterday and they are planning future ones too. Many of them were quite large especially considering how short notice they were prepared
Here’s one video montage with just handful of some of the protests https://bsky.app/profile/50501movement.bsky.social/post/3lifqkjki2k2o
“a peaceful movement”. Ok. Unilaterally disarming seems like a dubious move to me.
I don’t think protests where you just stand around and chant are especially effective. Maybe in 1950 when seeing people get firehosed was shocking, but the world is different today. Media is captured by the wealthy and most people don’t care.
Protests are a starting point not an ending one. Many of the groups involved in this like Indivisible are also recruiting people from theses protests to do the less flashy work of fighting back in other ways
They also are quite the lighting rod to get people to feel engaged more broadly. If you’ve never gone to a mass protest, it’s hard to describe how they reignite you to fight back. Seeing all those people there makes you realize you are not alone. That you are not the only one who doesn’t think this is okay
These most recent protests were also much larger than the media is describing it. The media is saying thousands nationwide, but there were multiple cities that each had 1000+ people. Many smaller cities had hundreds protesting
glad to see you guys are doing a bit of socialism to fight back.
just wanted to wish you all the best in your endeavours.
“Doing a bit of socialism” is one of the most ridiculous comments I have ever heard
ill admit it bends the definition a bit*, but this type of groundwork is important and going the right direction.
It doesn’t bend the definition. It bastardizes it. Socialism is the ownership of the means of production by the workers, this has nothing to do with socialism
I smoke a lot of pot. Probably the strangest part is how…I still have to live? I still have to go into work tomorrow, I’ve still got bills to pay. People just go about their day like nothing is happening. You sit in the office and joke about the ongoing hostile government takeover. Meanwhile, federal employees are getting fucked, trans people are getting erased, they’re building fuckin camps down in Guantanamo, people are fuckin starving outside shuttered USAID depots, and I still got work tomorrow. It’s like I’m just sitting here waiting for somebody to put a gun in my hands and tell me “the revolution starts now.” My local organizations are very focused on making sure people survive right now, which is a very good and noble focus to have, but I haven’t really heard of anyone planning something serious to fight back.
I’m from Russia, and I totally get your experience. When the war started, I had to go to work. There is the whole ass war, the government invades other countries under the most batshit pretense possible, people are being conscripted to go die in a ditch, the future just got canceled, and I need to care about my stupid little job, and stupid little rent, and stupid little groceries.
The only thing that helped me getting by head back in place (slightly) was getting the fuck out of there, but even that helped only a bit.
