Milestone

The United States is a strange place. I'm not particularly well-traveled, but overseas trips would routinely feature requests for explanation of this or that phenomenon that had come to be associated with America. Generally for the worse. (When a conversation opens with "what's up with" or "why on Earth does," it's pretty evident that one's going to have some explaining to do.) The great thing about answering these sorts of questions was that they forced me to understand what I thought about the topic. And I suspect that it's the best thing about this blog.

Because the United States isn't necessarily any less weird from the inside than it is from the outside. It's simply somewhat more explicable, due to some insider knowledge. But only somewhat.

For instance, I still don't understand the media's habit of portraying Donald Trump as having done something newsworthy every time he's simply being a jackass to people he (and by extension, his voter base) doesn't like. He referred to people as "living like vermin" in the United States, and pledged to prosecute members of Joe Biden's family and persecute people not authorized to be in the country? Why is this at all noteworthy? Democrats responding with outrage? You don't say... This story has become so shopworn that you could write it in advance. Yet it always seems to make it into the headlines. I have no idea why.

While we're on the topic, I don't claim to have any understanding of many Americans' seeming addiction to "outrage." I'm not going to claim to have been raised a Stoic, but I was always taught that public emotionality simply wasn't useful in reaching a goal. People on both sides of the Israel-Hamas conflict have been expressing outrage over everything from the actions of the side they disfavor to the fact that other people favor that side, and it hasn't moved the needle. The warring parties have other things to worry about than dueling protest marches in the United States, and the United States government had already decided whose side their on. So I'm never clear on what people hope to accomplish, other than being seen to be outraged.

This is the three-thousandth post here at Nobody In Particular, and for all that I've turned these things over in my head, and spend time typing them out for this site, I don't feel that I have any greater understanding of these (and several other) aspects of the modern United States. And, honestly, I doubt I'll gain any more insight going forward. But the intellectual exercise of "thinking out loud" about them may at least help me understand, and hopefully explain, other parts of this odd patchwork of a nation.