Doc_Crankenstein

Still within living memory.

George Takei was 4 when he and his family were put in a Japanese internment camp. Ruby Bridges, the first black student to attend a white-only school during desegregation, is only 70, currently lives in New Orleans, and is a prominent civil rights activist in the area.

The US doing anything for the betterment of society was a blip in its overall history, and done in spite of this country and its values, not because of them.

Human brains are sadly very predisposed to convenience over spending extra effort, especially when that convenience is the established norm; we tend to resist change unless that extra effort will bring a noticeable and immediate personal benefit. Degrees of separation from the act and the harm is also a big factor, most people stop thinking beyond a certain point and just go "it's not that deep".

It takes a lot of education and introspection about complex topics to understand how the "harder way" is actually cumulatively easier and brings more benefits but that also brings with it accepting certain truths one used to believe about the fundamental workings of the world they based all of their actions and even their identity on are actually falsehoods but the brain really, really hates that.

This is a key concept in writing enforceable legislation to get people to change habits. Had to learn about it in a class for my degree for wildlife conservation. The way is somehow exploiting how the way our brains work to trick them into believing that the decision to change is not only the best and easiest option but also that it was their idea to do so in order to allow their brain to handwave any inconsistency in their internal logic instead of fighting against their cognitive dissonance trying to change it by force.

Generally, people aren't bad people, they are just dumb primates who are trying their damnedest to live as easily as possible with the least amount of conflict while still feeling that they and their loved ones are protected from perceived harm. They "care" but they don't really think about what that means beyond a very, very limited scope of their immediate existence. After a certain point, arbitrary to each individual that will change at any given moment, they begin to wonder what it all has to do with the price of tea in China.

So don't convince them to care about the price of tea but instead how the price of tea will affect something they do care about in their lives.

Yea that's kinda by design unfortunately.

This is a very naive way of thinking that comes from a propagandized view of revolutions and ignorance of history on all the efforts that came before which allowed those revolutions to happen at all. It doesn't come together quickly. It is explicitly the result of having a community foundation and culture to build revolutionary effort on which took years of concerted effort to reach that point. Organizing doesn't happen spontaneously nor quickly. Anyone who told you otherwise was lying to you.

The ruling class has systematically been dismantling that very foundation since the Taft Hartley act.

The same risk of starvation that pushes people to revolution also pushes them to obedience to strongmen who promise to fix their problems by removing the "undesirables" who are being blamed for the misfortune. Without the proper working class culture of solidarity and a community foundation, people are more than likely just going to turn on their neighbors than they are to work with them, especially with the culture of hyper-individualism and xenophobia that the US has cultivated.

If we fail to build back that foundation, people are just going to sell each other out for their next slice of bread.

It isn't how much money but how you make it.

No billionaire ever made their money without necessitating the exploitation that is inherent to being an owning class citizen. Yet, there are also plenty of people of much lesser net worth who exploit workers all the same, just to a smaller extent.

Remember the problem isn't just billionaires but the system that enables their existence and those who willingly choose to perpetuate it.

The formation of parties is unfortunately inevitable under electoralist political structures. The system was fundamentally flawed.

This is such a toxic mentality. If you can't get emotional intimacy in a romantic relationship without sex then you have problems you need to work on.