I watched this video today.
It's funny, and it's a little silly, and then it's shocking...and then it is sad.
It's really, quite profoundly sad. As you watch these 8 people from outside the US observe just a series of clips, and images, and facts, presented honestly for consumption.
We've all been grappling I think in part with the pandemic, but also with watching the literal fall of Rome, except America. This superpower, this dream of a nation, represented in worldwide media as a giant, indomitable. And it's toppling faster than any of us imagined. Faster, and slower. It didn't happen overnight, with some massive explosion or realization about an asteroid.
It happened over masks, and black lives rights, and going out to restaurants or getting your hair cut.
It happened over privilege, and rights, and propaganda.
It happened because people lost touch with empathy.
There's a comment under the video. It derides the people watching the videos. In response to someone else who notes "I can really identify with these people having to observe this, their shock, their outrage, their sorrow for Americans."
And in response to that comment, an American, callous: "I can't. They're all paid actors."
And I thought to myself, how did we get here? How did we get here, that a simple recording of 8 strangers, with empathy, is so unbelievable? So alien? So outside the realm of possibility?
How have we gotten here in society that cynicism infects so far, that when a South Korean woman can't contain her sorrow for a hundred thousand lost lives, you see performance, instead of her anguish?
How did we get here?
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