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  • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    How much of it is just apathy/willingful ignorance?

    I think the "They're just using the balloon to cover up the train fire" line is overblown, simply because I don't believe we'd have seen any less fixation on China Balloon in the absence of a train fire. That said, a lot of this really does just boil down to what's in everyone's field of view.

    I was picking through a copy of the NYT the other day and there were no less than six different articles talking about the balloon. Nothing about Ohio, the train fire, or the resultant pet/wild life die-off. CNN was on in the background and they just toggled between Balloon stories and the Syria/Turkey earthquake. Virtually nothing about Ohio.

    I don't know if I'd have even heard about the train story if not for this site pointing me to relevant Twitter feeds. And despite all the traffic those feeds are creating, I still don't see them trending on Twitter. So where are people supposed to be getting clued in on these stories? Idk. Not everyone is going to be in niche leftist internet forums.

    Americans would rather scold other citizens of the world for not overthrowing their government when they experiencing problems.

    Even the scolding is hollow and meaningless. Like, I was at my friends' house the other day. And their kid mentions, somewhat off-handedly, "I hope Ukraine wins the war with Russia". Wasn't really in a position to probe the sentiment, but... I feel like this is a common attitude in the US. See a conflict, pick a side, root for it. Maybe buy some of your team's merch. Maybe vote, if you think it'll be good for your team... uh... somehow.

    But there's nothing else you can really do. Not for problems at home or abroad.

    Like, its not as if folks in Texas want to experience a power failure. But shy of dropping several grand on an at-home generator or moving to a rental unit with a backup power source, what is anyone supposed to do? Who even knows how the grid works, much less what we'd need to do to fix these kinds of problems?