I was a teenager during 9/11, and watching nearly every adult in my life go absolutely stark raving mad from both fear and blood lust was a real wake up call for me, I can tell you that much. If you aren’t old enough to remember it there’s nothing recent I can really compare it to. 9/11 and the Iraq War are what really got Fox News off the ground, so just imagine living in Fox News land, because it was absolutely tapping into some primal response a lot of people had.

It happened when I was kid growing up in another country, as a US citizen, and then coming to the US to see for myself why I had heard so much trash talk about Americans.

We are arrogant, spoiled, dumb and racist. The world expects us to be better. We are privileged like a spoiled rich brat and are waisting our fortune. We have what other countries do not and yet still ignore our own poor. We openly shit on our own minorities and immigrants that want to come here and build with us.

Even dirt poor countries have free healthcare and education. Our education system has been ignored and allowed to fall farther and farther behind the entire world.I came here in when I was in the 6th grade and immediately was shocked that kids my age could barely read. This is richest country on the entire planet, ever! Multiple choice? You mean they give you the answer and just mix it in with wrong answers!?

Our celebrated values that we put forward in our popular media (how the world learns about us by the way) do not include humility or compassion, it’s all direct or veiled celebrations of military might. Every hero is fighting. Guns guns guns, fight fight fight. Our military power allows us to do nearly whatever we want and we do.

Every disparaging comment I heard or that was aimed at me for being American I learned to be true. They are tired of our bullshit. The world doesn’t hate us, they are deeply disappointed in us. Several generations of disappointment.

Perspective from a mid-twenties American. I realized it was horseshit during the 2016 Trump election.

I was turning 18 just in time to vote in this election, and it was right around then that I started forming my own ideas about politics and what political “side” I stood on. Like a majority people with a semi-functioning brain, I thought Trump was an actual joke, a meme that had no chance at actually winning, like how we were acting when Kanye ran. Unironically, I thought that having trainwrecks of a leader was something that “other countries” did, obviously America wouldn’t let someone like this win because even though we make little mistakes here and there like Iraq and slavery we’re still the good guys and we wouldn’t actually let a moron like Trump become our president.

When it became obvious that he was more than a joke and an actual serious candidate with high potential to win, I realized that the only people consistently talking about how amazing America was at everything were the people voting for him, and I started dissecting the things I’d taken for granted.

America is #1 in production of aircraft carriers. America is #1 in the number of incarcerated citizens per capita. America is #1 in the number of adults who think angels are real. America is #1 in defense spending.

For me it was when I was around 8 or 9 and met someone from Kenya. They could speak perfect English, wore normal clothes, and talked about having electricity. I’d literally never been told that those things existed in Africa - every reference to that continent only talked about tribes and jungles, save for Egypt which only talked about ruins and deserts. I asked around and found that most of the rest of the world has the same stuff we have, and most countries have a functioning government. I was so confused - why were we the country of freedom when everyone else has the same thing?

At the time I just assumed that there was something I was missing, or maybe the rest of the world just caught up to our idea, but eventually I came to the conclusion that they tell us we’re the country of freedom - and keep our studies of other countries to a minimum when we’re young - so that we can internalize the rhetoric that our country is the best before we find out that most other countries about the same, and often better in certain ways.

I grew up poor and black. The illusion was never there.

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.

When I graduated from college. I was fed the, “work hard, go to college, live well” spiel. I worked hard, I went to college, graduated with honors.

All I have to show for it is debt.

I work a job that’s… Fine, but I also cry most days because of the misery of it. I haven’t gone to a doctor in years because I can’t afford it. I can barely save (I have, like, $100 in “savings”). I will likely never be a home owner, and I will most likely have to work until I die, which breaks my spirit the more I think about it.

On less personal note, when I got to sit at the “grown up” table in regards to politics, I quickly realized that (most) people in government either don’t give a shit or actively work against the peoples interest. I hear of other countries with their free Healthcare and education, workers rights, pensions, and I weep with envy. America is like a third world country in a first world mask.

My answer to this is so complex I’m not sure I can put it into words. Grew up at the very height of cold war US #1 propaganda in a military community. I’m a veteran. So many moments where those sentiments rang a little hollow, even if they were enticing, but I really wasn’t aware enough to put it all together at any one moment.

I’m in my 50s now, and over time enough of those myths of US exceptionalism were weakened as I learned more about US imperialism, and became more aware of how easy it is to find yourself choosing between food and medicine (or even getting neither) in the US, and could see how so much of our culture revolves around hiding our nation’s flaws from ourselves like avoiding seeing your own fat naked ass (or similar insecurity you have) in the mirror. Edit: I can’t not drop a line here about realizing that our mistreatment of African Americans didn’t end with the civil rights act. I grew up privileged and sheltered enough that I believed it had for a very long time. And our police problems are only the most high profile example of how this continues. I don’t think it’s the most pervasive nor the most systemically damaging example though.

I think we have the potential to live up to every single bit of propaganda. I think we’ve done a poor job executing on it. Individual people I meet every single day amaze me with how wonderful and generous they are. But huge groups of our people are pretty awful, and a much bigger group is still avoiding looking at their fat ass in the mirror when they come out of the shower. I’m not sure whether things will head up or down from here.

I’ll close with this, which covers most of my bases I think: https://youtu.be/OO18F4aKGzQ

When they had us stand up in grade school and pledge allegiance to the flag. Nope, no thanks. If we’re that amazing we wouldn’t compel children to worship nationalist symbols, we’d give them reasons to be proud of their country rather than trying to compel worship.

On the other hand we’re #1 at a lot of things, like medical bankruptcies, mass shootings and incarceration per capita. So, go us and our amazing country?

Its kinda hard to ignore the healthcare problem. That always stank of corruption.

Reading A People’s History of the United States put that on my radar. I hadn’t given the idea any thought until a college course assigned this book. I was educated in a standard American public school during the Reagan and Clinton eras, complete with Pledge of Allegiance. The standard schoolbooks omit a lot of atrocities and smooth over the ugly reality.

Whatever legitimate criticisms you lay on it, Zinn’s takedown opened my worldview and intensified my pre-existing anti-authoritarian streak.

9/11 happened shortly after and by then I considered Bush an illegitimate president. I watched him wage an unjustified war, and with the whole of our bloody rampage across the globe that clicked neatly into place. “America #1” is a sick joke.

When I was having my “what’d you learn at school today?” check-in dinner conversation with mom, and I learned the European settlers did not, in fact, peacefully move in and fairly share the land with Native Americans. :|

Learning actual US history, for starters.

For me it was around when I joined the furry fandom.

Grew up in a small, secluded town in the deep south, one with a 99.3% white majority at the time and wasn’t far from a sundown area. I was very much sheltered from outside culture and world views both by my mother and just from the circumstances of where I lived. Throw in some undiagnosed autism and a deeply trusting nature, and I was effectively set to stay in the mental cesspool of my peers.

As a troubled teen facing emotional and religious trauma from an abusive father figure, I turned to escapism wherever I could, and once I got my first computer I started getting into PC gaming online, and I eventually found a furry friendly server on a Half-Life 2 mod.

All of the sudden I’m talking to people of all places and creeds. Most were Americans, sure, but there were tons of folks from far more backgrounds and environments than I’d ever seen before. And most were furries. People from a generally more left leaning background who are also comfortably open about sexuality. Found out I liked dudes from them, cause I’d genuinely never even considered that as a possibility until then and mom hadn’t instilled her anti gay rhetoric in me yet.

And of course, I started learning new things from them. Things I’d never heard of before, things that would never be taught at the school I went to. I learned of the Tuskeegee syphilis experiments, of MK ULTRA, of Guantanamo Bay and the atrocities there. That roughly 1 in four prisoners in the world are in American prisons. That the pledge of allegiance is really fucking weird. I learned of the massive income inequality we’re troubled with, of the police brutality our people of color experience, that our healthcare system is utterly broken by design, that our lawmakers are paid for and bought out, and of course I learned that this list is FAR from exhaustive - feel free to add to this list!

Plus just generally interacting with people from other countries and cultures, seeing these different perspectives and world views and experiences, it all helped me slowly, gradually realize that there’s so much beautiful culture and so many beautiful people in this mote of dust we all share. Cultures and people that so many of my peers were apathetic towards most often, mildly entertained by in media and media alone at best, and actively hostile towards at worst. Just the idea of my neighbor yelling obscenities towards a Latino man for working the exploitative jobs that Americans would never touch themselves broke my young heart.

Once Trump’s campaign really started taking steam, I was a very different person from who my mom wanted me to be, and though it drove a wedge between us (on top of her just being a shit parent for me), I prefer it this way.