Like I won’t say that absolutely everything about the USA was bad, necessarily, and I of course have my own biases at play here… But the point sparing the details is really just like, I’ve spent the past month thinking practically every day about how every single US-based communist really must be working in incredibly trying circumstances, if even just visiting had me feeling lethargic and kinda wanting to go home within a week. Now that I’m back home again, that time in the USA is already starting to feel like a strange dream again.
So, uhh, what are your secrets, basically? Like I’m sure that all the nonsense of the USA feels like less of a burden to put up with if you grew up with it and have spent little to no time in other parts of the world, but still. I honestly do not think I could live in the USA until it is decolonized, but when that happens, it wouldn’t be called the USA anymore, anyways.
Shit, you should have come hiking in Colorado. The American West is stunningly beautiful. The only way I keep my sanity here is by retreating into the Rockies and forgetting that other people exist.
People here are really libbed up in my experience. Especially in Boulder, where they’ve destroyed the real left wing culture it had decades ago and replaced it with full on ravenous lib culture, celebrating pricing out the workers and hand wringing over meaningless gestures. The nature is beautiful for sure, but the class consciousness is lower than other parts of the country I’ve visited. Still a lot of internalized racism from living in what is basically a segregated state too.
I don’t mean to endorse Colorado’s politics at all. Sociopolitically it’s a deeply flawed place with a demonic history, and it’s those Front Range politics I’m escaping in the mountains. But when a flatlander visits I take them to somewhere like RMNP or James Peak Wilderness and they see something worth defending from Americans. The one redeeming thing I can think of for this country is the unimaginably beautiful landscape it pollutes by its existence. My political activism is becoming increasingly rooted in natural stewardship because everything beneath that wilderness is pretty much fucked but I can at least plant a tree which might outlive the empire.