I think that might be the human condition in general, and why huge problems like climate change and economic collapse keep happening (almost) everywhere.

America has the problem all conqueror cultures have - they exist only as long as there are things to conquer.

The history of itself that America tells itself is a long series of self-serving revisionist narratives about how we're justified in our unjustifiable actions. White Americans tell themselves its totally okay to appropriate from other cultures what is lacking in their own. Whiteness is not a cultural identity and that inherent hollowness produces what we see around us. There is no community of whites like there is community within the cultures the white identity seeks to oppress (while admiring and stealing from). If left unchecked, white supremacist identity seeks to stamp out the oppressed they've exploited (then tell themselves all of that stolen culture was rightfully theirs all along).

The whole "bootstraps" culture is a community-destroying myth that Americans have perpetrated upon themselves solely to keep rich pedophiles in power.

they don't know it's happening.

and they have no ability to do anything about it. how exactly is your average working person going to change gas prices? best they can do is try to drive less.

You are acting as if you are not already having that.

Because people stopped doing violence and said “violence is wrong, we can resolve the system through the system” except the system was captured by the rulers.

No solution is permanent. And violence isn't technically the fix either.

The problem is you can't solve certain problems from within the broken system. It's possible to go outside the system but without violence but it's rare. The violence is what enables outside system fixes to be possible and those have been of varied quality.

It's not what we do when we're violent, it's what we do immediately afterwards that matters.

Nonviolence often just means you don't get to make any meaningful changes at all, because they aren't going to just let you vote them out of power and into to jail.

Because people got tricked into thinking they could vote things better.

There is no system you can set up that will not eventually become corrupt or compromised. Even the word "revolution" suggests its cyclical nature. It must periodically happen.

What's that?

They only pill-like thing at gas stations I know are m&ms

As a member of Church of Bacon, I approve this message.

You’re the problem.