Everything just seems so out of control. The US seems to be tearing itself apart. The world is on fire. We seem to be going backwards when it comes to freedom and human rights. We’ve turned our backs on each other. How do you cope with all this without just giving up?
I scroll lemmy. Apparently we are about to go to war with Texas.
We can never preach our values to the world again. How can our allies trust us?
The United States has been overthrowing democratically elected governments for a hundred years. The CIA has exported terrorism, trained gorilla soldiers to terrorize and torture civilians, and promoted fascism over democracy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change
We have a war on drugs that is really a war on people, an excuse to target people of color. We have a for profit prison system run by private corporations that lobby politicians in what is effectively legal bribery. Our entire economic system, capitalism, allows those with wealth to exploit those without, and to use their power and money to “lobby” politicians. People are never going to get a fair shake.
Edit: The US has amazing people and so much potential to survive and overcome our problems, but there’s a darkness that motivates people in power, maybe it’s fear of communism or fear of powerlessness, idk
It’s greed, mate
Don’t spend all your time reading news, they are purposely negative because it generates more interest and money, don’t take everything you read as truth.
99% of these problems won’t turn into anything other than a faded memory.
End of the day, nothing you can do will change what’s happening half way across the world, so why let it change you?
On average the world is better than it’s ever been. Higher life expectancies, less war, better quality of life; it’s all generally on the up. Would you rather go back to the last financial crisis? When the ozone layer was being depleted? The interment threat of nuclear annihilation? Race riots? Women not being able to vote? High infant mortality? etc, etc
On average the world is better than it’s ever been
Of course, certain groups of people have been trying to reverse these trends in the name of…money? Tradition?
The newer generations are no longer becoming smarter (I believe it was the Flynn effect). Education is being defunded at all levels.
The cost of living in many parts of the world has been outpacing wages… especially now, but for decades. Yet we have more wealth hoarded into fewer hands.
Anti-vax and anti-science movements have been reintroducing measles and have been making it hard to fight other diseases.
We are seeing the effects of these things in action, and they will only get worse over time.
They’re trying to reverse those trends because acknowledging those trends means giving up on their theory that our dominant economic system is defunct.
It’s cancer and it’s killing us all.
Exactly. That kind of thinking doesn’t work when you realize the “cancer” is producing situations like:
Higher life expectancies, less war, better quality of life
Do you disagree with those statements? Do you need to see evidence before you’ll believe them?
Or do you acknowledge the statements, but disagree that they justify the “cancer” of our current economic system?
Do you disagree with those statements? Do you need to see evidence before you’ll believe them?\
I disagree with them.
Higher life expectancy - I wouldn’t attribute that to capitalism. Further more life expectancy in the US is declining afaik.
Less war - What do you mean? There’s a war in Ukraine, one in Palestine, and there’s been perpetual war since …forever. The US war machine always bombs some country, assassinates a democratically elected leader, etc.
Better quality of life - For the 1% at the expense of all the others maybe.Capitalism is all about profits, not about better products, better quality of life, etc. In fact it’s easily against those things if they get in the way of profit. You can see enshittification everywhere.
For example it would be against their interest for a pharmaceutical company to sell the permanent cure for a disease instead of life-long medical treatment. The latter would be subscription-based therefore create more profit. The cancer comparison is quite fitting imo.
I love it when the next post on my feed fits perfectly
Focus:
Exactly as Stephen R. Covey pointed-out, in “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families”
https://www.amazon.com/Habits-Effective-Families-Revised-Updated/dp/1250857775/
You have a Circle-of-Concern: all the things you attach your awareness on,
and you also have a Circle-of-Influence: all the things you actually can alter.
Since the bigger your Circle-of-Concern, the LESS life-energy you have for your Circle-of-Influence, therefore you need to deliberately reduce your Circle-of-Concern, in order to expand your Circle-of-influence.
That’s it: it’s that simple.
Deny awareness-vampire processes your lifeblood.
Own your own self, more, & use that self-owning in order to make your portion of the world more-healthy.
Just because mass-media did all it could to make one boundaryless, helplessly stuck in consuming-trance, bedazzled & led-along like steers the industry is bringing into the abbatoir, doesn’t mean that you or I agreed to our lives doing/being only that, does it?
We never agreed.
It is our right to break the “agreement” that our childhoods were signed-into, before we could do any considered-reasoning.
Either we have the guts & gall to do it, or our-lives are consumed by the “machine” that exists only for sake of its own transient profit-sensations.
Owning one’s own life is a right.
_ /\ _