145
Why do some Americans "feel ashamed" for being American even when it's not their fault?
(sh.itjust.works)
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
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There's a huge difference between being ashamed of your Government's actions and behavior and being ashamed of who you are/where you were born.
One is a valid criticism of the ruling class ignoring the people's desire for peace and social responsibility. The other is a mental health issue much like some people who are ashamed of the race or gender they were born as.
I get attacked by people unable to separate this conflation because I encourage people resistant to our government to pick up the goddamn American flag and wave it. To have some measure of pride in the institution we live in so others take it seriously when we demand improvement.
That's not really "shame", not really the right word for it, shame is something you feel about yourself, this is more like resentment.
I think it becomes shame because we recognize we've benefited from the system that has shit all over so many. Even indirectly, it's hard to think about all the ways I've benefited from - just to say one thing - all the cheap open land (places like texas, nebraska, oklahoma, OR & WA) we got after putting the natives in concentration camps and murdering most of them.
Like, I try to enjoy a national park but then realize: this was someone's home. Many peoples, in fact. We took it, put up gates, and charge people to harass the animals. And that's the places we've saved from industrial pollution and factory farming.
I genuinely feel like a lot of people don't think very much about their feelings or where they come from, and end up with really mixed-up or inconsistent values.
If you ask a lot of Americans why they feel the way they do about their country, negative or positive, they often become irritated or upset because most people just tie a lot of associations and emotions to other concepts and words. Which is fine, that's how brains work. But I think if you're involved in a democracy you should have some level of actual thought towards how you feel, what you want from your country and who should be representing those values. I can't get people on either side of the political spectrum to care about any of that shit... which is why China will probably have the solar system in a generation.
OMG I just had a thought.
Remember what happened when Great Britain expanded and colonized stuff? 13 colonies?Independence?
OMG wouldn't it be cool if China did that to like Mars, then the Martian colonists be like, "no fuck you CCP", then:
Declaration of Independence
United Provinces of Mars
Constitution (hopefully a smarter constitution)
Martian Revolution
Becomes a Solar Superpower
Chinese becomes the lingua franca of the solar system.
Time is a circle lmao.
Literally just The Expanse timeline, but without blue goo and Chinese becomes the lingua franca of the UN. LOL
FOR MARS!
火星联合众国
Look, whatever you have to do to keep Elon out of the place, I am fully supportive.
Seriously though, I was watching a documentary on the International Space Station a few days ago and listening to how this major network was hyping up such a "huge American engineering challenge" and "doing the impossible as the world watched on" and I couldn't help but grumble "China has made three stations in half the time and those are just practice for an actual series of much bigger projects." Literally, America gets almost NO news on progress and achievements outside of the USA.
This is kind of the plot of Armored Core if you also made it a cyberpunk corporate dystopia.