The other half, Evlin DuBose
Evlin DuBose wrote about the ridiculous anti-lockdown protests sweeping through America in April. Her eloquent piece was crowned the winner of The Comma’s Semester 1 Competition.
-T
HIS FEELS CINEMATIC — LIKE a zombie slasher, or that Soderbergh oracle from ‘11. You could laugh or cry at the sheer absurdity. This year has been a fiery, flooded, warring, disease-riddled trip through the looking glass, and just for good measure, there are alt-right human truck-nuts protesting in illegal crowds in the middle of an actual pandemic for their right to…get a haircut.
blind, bellicose optimism and faith in our leaders. USA! USA! Never mind the fact that things such as diet and physical/mental health correspond closely with income inequality—as does quality of education (if you ever received one) and the ability to travel outside your own hometown bubble. Never mind that America is one of the most economically unequal first world countries. Never mind that a vocal minority who subsists on untruths can find their voices amplified through the megaphone of the media.
Hey, I get it. To make fun of Americans is punching up, and you wouldn’t be wrong. We are (were?) the world leaders, and yet we’re fat. We’re mighty and gung-ho—and gun-ho, for that matter. We bleed red-white-‘n-blue, patriots galore. We’re casually racist. Woefully uneducated. Always surprised to learn there are countries other than America. We’re a land of migrants (but recent arrivals can take a hike, or scrub our toilets—just ask Kelly Osbourne). We pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and come first in everything— sometimes by tripping the competition. It’s the land of opportunity, if you work hard enough, and there’s something so darn charming about our
And for what it’s worth, you wouldn’t be wrong. But you wouldn’t be entirely right, either. I know, on this particular front, Americans have a weak leg to stand on. The land of generalising and othering foreign countries has a tenuous claim, at best, to being generalised and 86
