I used to think my country was tolerant and that we were better than this, but the result of Brexit vote and the crap that’s been happening lately has really showed a side of Britain that I didn’t think still existed... and it seems to be getting worse and worse all the time .
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It's, sadly, so the same in the States. People who had been keeping quiet are now out and loud again, and it's truly sad. It's like we've lost fifty years of progress. I remember living with so much of this racist, sexist, homophobic, ethnocentric nonsense when I was a kid in West Texas. It sure seemed like we'd started to learn better.
Then again, maybe that progress was all an illusion in the first place. Not all of it was, I'm sure of that. But obviously the roots of the disease were never exterminated. I think that there's such a level of frustration just simmering that it has to go somewhere. The US culture is built on a Hollywood dream. People see others having fantastic lives (on TV, etc.) and somehow the word "deserve" comes into play. Every special snowflake
deserves everything they want. And when they don't
have that picture-perfect, wonderful life with all the nice homes and neighborhoods, and expensive toys and what used to be luxuries, resentment builds up.
I've always thought that resentment is right next to anger, and it is always looking for an "out" (or you end up jumping off a bridge). Scapegoats are really handy for funneling that unpleasant emotion, aren't they? It gives you someone to hate, someone you can blame for your life not being what you want/expect it to be. It's always so much easier to blame "the other" - be it a person or an institution - than to acknowledge that you have simply had bad luck, you had no chance in the first place, or that it's your own fault when things don't go to expectations. People, myself included, go through life with freaking blinders on.
People can be stupid. Put too many people together, stupid or smart, and you get a mob. Mobs are entities of their own, where the usual social rules are out the window. If you can get to individuals, you can work for change. If you are dealing with a group that is self-reinforcing, it'd be a hell of a job to persuade them to go somewhere other than where their internal reinforcement has them going.
Not that it's impossible. I think of Joe McCarthy. He eventually went down in flames, after causing so much misery. But the mob that he led, well, some of them are still out there. It's the same with other things. They lurk. Like a virus. And in a moment of weakness....
And, with that, I have bread to go make. I tend to ponder things too much, especially things outside my control, and it's better if I do not. I sure do wish I could fix all this misery. Maybe even a little bit of it. But, we're back to there's no way for me to do it. I can't even become "an activist" (as if I had that kind of talent) as I'd end up on a watch list, and get myself deported.
And yeah, the government here. Well, there's a reason the US (and a number of other countries) went independent. The US bureaucracy has it's foibles, but you don't ~usually~ have departments running amok and trampling people without legislative oversight or some serious lawsuits flying.