Thread by @Rrrrnessa

I don’t think all Americans are so evil, callous and horrid people as a whole. I truly don’t…I just do not believe that they live on the same planet as the rest of us. & as someone that spent a decent amount of my life there, it’s hard for them to ever understand the rest.

I’ve often said that being a poor American still makes you richer than almost all other countries’s middle class does.

The amount of privilege you have when you’re born there, when you are raised there, and when you get to go outside of it with that fancy American passport…

It’s difficult for any person to see past their own experiences, their own trauma and marginalisation. That’s a natural part of being human in some ways. Empathy is difficult.

But for Americans, empathy isn’t just difficult…it’s out of reach.

I also do not think Americans are any dumber than other people on average. I really don’t. Many are idiots, sure, but last week in a cafe in Sarajevo I had to argue with 4 educated Bosniaks that Geneva was not, in fact, a country.

The issue for me isn’t their lack of empathy or intelligence or anything of the sort. The issue is that ultimately they are Americans before they are human. They will always be American before they are any other marginalised identity. Even Diaspora groups fall into this.

Some realise it and some do not but the reality is that the American dream and its exceptionalism has always been built of the exploitation of others. Starting with Native Americans, then Africans, then immigrants, and the slowly the world and its wars.

My country is a corrupt cesspit of ethnonationalism and woeful inadequate government. Maybe it would still be so even if it was Yugoslavia. Maybe it would still be so if it was still the RBiH. But we fought for one country & America forced a different one on us.

We fought for equality, multiculturalism, democracy, human rights for all, dignity for all. We got none of that. & yes, the USA ensured we did not. They imposed Dayton. They keep the ethnonationalists in power. The people suffer and American & Euro companies get richer.

Whether it is Bosnia or Palestine or Syria or Yemen or Ukraine or Iraq or Afghanistan or Somalia or Congo or Venezuela or Cuba or countless other countries on this planet….it is our suffering that pays for American exceptionalism.

& after being forced to watch as a genocide unfolded for over a year, only 30 years after the genocide I survived did, it has been made more clear to me than ever that my anger towards America has slowly turned to loathing. & yet, even with that I still hold their passport.

& I won’t get rid of it either because I worked for it for so long…and I try to trick myself into thinking I earned it. I paid for it with the blood of my family members and the displacement off my land and working from age 14 and paying taxes.

The reality is that the passport I earned came from Iraq or Afghanistan or Yemen maybe…and passport the person that granted me mine came from Bosnia or Somalia and theirs came from Vietnam or Korea and the person before them the Native Americans and the enslaved peoples.

America will be fine under Trump, even if some Americans won’t be. But entire countries could and may very well disappear and become an old Yugoslav map you hang up in the bedroom of your parents house, who work 2 jobs each to give you the American dream.

There are so many times that I see American people, some on the left, some hardcore communists & anarchists and yes, VoteBlue libs too, post the most asinine, self-indulgent bs ever and I can’t help but roll my eyes. The exceptionalism is so so deeply ingrained.

All of this to say is that I strongly believe that we have made a serious error in judgment when we started following Americans on socio-political stances.

They are superficial and self-indulgent at best.

Human rights, anti-war movements, disability justice, feminism, anti racism etc etc has boiled down to this self-indulgent public stoning machinations that are simply not ever going to be the thing that saves us.

We do not need 1000s of books on feminist history nor do we need the same 10-15 type of threads on 10-15 type of most marginalised identities.

None of that will save us.

Americans will not save us. They will save themselves, they will save each other and they will save their country before they even blow a little air out of their exceptional lungs to “help” get us out of the fires.

I can’t help but think of the past week and think it is as if many Americans woke up and found out the world is ending when Trump elected but for the rest of us, the world has ended many, many times before…and we survived it.