6th grade I really started paying attention to the pledge of allegiance in really what something like that meant. I question why I was pledging my allegiance to a flag every morning. It wasn’t my choice I was told to do this. And that didn’t feel right to me until I stopped.
In high school. Noticed the various branches of the military would never leave and were always trying to recruit. I noticed in the kids around me behavioral differences, as they were hyped up to join the military. But my great-grandfather who is in the military and was on Normandy Beach… He wasn’t hype about the military. My uncle who is in the Navy barely speaks of it. And my other uncle who was in the Vietnam war… Seemed rather traumatized by the whole experience. And George W Bush and everything surrounding 9/11, the definite WMDs that totally existed.
Also in high school I got to meet foreign exchange students. Made friends with a bunch of them and got to learn about how things are in various parts of the world that really didn’t add up to the things that I was being told.
Then in college and post college, thanks though like early YouTube and even early Reddit, I got to learn a lot more about the world than anything grade school had ever taught me.
I grew up poor and black. The illusion was never there.
When I moved out of my parents house and stopped watching fox news.
I figured out pretty quickly that there were really big differences between Fox,NBC and CNN, at that point I saw CNN as being approximately truthful.
A couple years later one of the guys that worked with had CNN lies bumper stickers. I thought BS, but realized I really should see what it was about.
I looked into that. And found that he wasn’t wrong but it was way more complicated than that.
I realized that even the news channels with the most journalistic integrity still have numbers to make. If I’m not riled up they consider me under-consuming. And there were still agendas here and there.
In the Netherlands we had (and as far as I know, still have) state sponsored news and they are by law obliged to be truthful and neutral. I always found it to be a very trustworthy source, and I think this is something that other countries should do too. It had no numbers to make, they got paid no matter what, so they simply made the news, they were journalists. 10/10 would recommend
It’s not a lie. It’s a point of view. It’s a declaration of intent. Being #1 isn’t a privilege, it’s a responsibility, and a choice.
Sorry, bullshit.
It’s always “we’re the beat, we’re the best at X” whereas the reality is that you have rampant poverty, institutionalized racism (hello US police forces!), shit and unaffordable healthcare with (apparently) doctors who put their religion over their Hippocratic oath, unaffordable education which doesn’t get you a good job anymore anyways, you don’t work to live, you live to work, you have almost no vacation days whatsoever, you have no free days agter when your baby is born,you can’t do anything anymore without a car, you have no freedoms, but they convinced you that parading around military style weapons is freedom somehow. You teach little children at school that sex is wrong, but it’s good to knoe what to do when the next mass murderer visits your school again. Your police is racist, uneducated, inept, and corrupt… I could go on, but you get the idea.
Sorry, America sucks, to paraphrase someone else in this thread: it’s a third world country wearing the mask of a first world country.
Right. Being #1 means being the best. “We are the best at X” is an equivalent statement to “We’re #1”.
Not disputing that.
What I’m saying is that both of those statements can be, and are, statements of intent.
You really think a pizza place claiming “The best pizza in NYC!” thinks they’re stating an objective fact? No, they’re stating their commitment to acting as if that’s their role. It’s a commitment to excellence and striving.
Not American, but my views of America being “the good guy” completely crumbled when I read Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent.
It made me put into perspective the amount of propaganda we’re being fed by mass media, just by reporting with carefully chosen words. It’s obviously not limited to America, because the same patterns are being used all around the world to justify imperialism, nationalism and ruthless capitalism.
It also helped me realise how fucked up some of the things my government did (and is still doing to be fair) and we just gobble it up, because it’s insanely hard to get out of the bubbles we’ve created for ourselves.A definite must read book. Which country do you live in?
