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It doesn't help that the same billionaires have spent decades dumbing down education and making higher education prohibitively expensive. All while cramming every single wedge issues under the sun into the national narrative to further entrench this tribal mentality. I know all of what you say is true, but it seems all but impossible to combat at this point.
It's so hard to have any motivation to carry on in this world given a portion of it is fine with all manner of atrocities so long as "their guy" is "winning." Why try to make anything better -- be it more just, equal, enjoyable for all -- when a good portion of the country (possibly the world) is so hell-bent on making it worse because they dislike a small subset of some insignificant problem?
Yesterday was the 4th. I just don't know why anyone celebrated at all. What's there to celebrate at this point when some will sell out their future, and the future of their own, for a "red hat?"
It does help though... it helps them. And that's an important distinction that we would do well to recognize.
When a lion wants to eat you, b/c it is hungry or maybe it just wants to fatally bat you around for fun, it is not the lion's job to not eat you - it is our job to not allow it to do so, or at least make our best attempt.
I am also not certain that this fight can be "won". It most certainly can/will not if we do not even try.
Even so, there is value in learning things. Whatever comes after America will be rough, and it behooves us to wake the fuck up and face that rather than go back to sleep.
More to the point, it is more fun to live life awake and facing forward, than to have to constantly anticipate bad things that are inevitably coming but we have no idea when or how or what precisely it will look like. Maybe it won't even be all that bad? But we'll only know that if we look at it with our eyes.
But back to the fun aspect: why be Sisyphus, constantly struggling against things that we have no control over, when we can focus our attention on the things we can control? We cannot control "them" - we never will be able to control "them" - so why worry about it? That seems counterproductive. Instead, focus on what we can control, and the motivation returns. There is no spoon. No, seriously, there isn't: we could only ever control ourselves, that's it and that's all that was ever possible, anywhere, at any time.
Another neat thing: when the USA broke away from England, it spawned an entire rash of similar actions in other colonies that gave the middle finger to the English kings, and other nations likewise ditched their own kings of their respective colonial empires as well (e.g. France). We inspired the entire fucking world. As Rome did before us. Even after we fall, nobody is taking that legacy away - it will live on for thousands of years when all of us have long since died, of causes natural and/or otherwise.
Moreover, they have updated to Democracy 2.0, while we remained mired in our 1.0 version, and really having downgraded even from that by allowing devolution into a 2-party system that brought us to this point. Maybe after a time we can import some of those newer democratic systems back in, if fascism replaces democracy and then democracy replaces that fascism, and we can have a bright shiny Democracy 3.0 then. Though one thing is for certain: Democracy 1.0 has already failed - not will fail in some future sense, but already. Either that or we can at least not be blamed overmuch for thinking thus, given how fatally we seem to be wounded lately.
Focus on what you can control. There is no spoon - only ourselves.