Non-Americans Are Sharing Their Brutally Honest Thoughts About The US Right Now, And It’s MESSY

16.

“I’m a German who’s lived in the US for an extended period. I view Americans as universally extremist and complacent. Both conservatives and progressives are always trying to break new ground by pushing the envelope to see who can piss each other off harder. Both sides see the other as the enemy. I don’t want to equivocate too much since fascists and kleptocrats are obviously far more destructive than neoliberal social progressives, but they share this particular feature: they’re complacent in that none of them truly believe that anything destructive can happen at home.”

“They can’t quite picture it; they don’t grasp what it means to label your neighbor as an enemy. They don’t fully understand the gravity of destabilizing your country on one end, or the true cost of waiting and seeing on the other. They don’t have mountains of decaying rubble outside their cities or videos in their history classes showing enemies marching through eerily familiar streets.”

—schw0b