Hating “America First” First

NB: this is a US-centric post. The Qs (Republiqans, Quibertarians, Qump supporters…): they sneer at us fact-using logical folk (liberals, progressives, feminists, environmentalists…), with their hate-speech catch-phrases (adjacent to such terms as “hate-America-first-Liberal”). Whatever. Our hatred is for stuff that’s actually wrong, but characteristic of the US as it actually is (“if right, to be kept right, if wrong, to be set right”). If you already fancy the QSA to be perfeqt, setting things right is tantamount to treason, I guess. Here are some of my hatreds.

Shitty t-shirts. I buy t-shirts wherever I travel. Although most of my travel is domestic, an unrepresentative proportion of my t-shirts is Canadian or European. Now, I don’t buy more shirts than usual when traveling internationally. I don each one in turn, so they get relatively equal wear, and as soon as I notice that one has too many holes, I toss it. I conclude that the American shirts are simply low quality. I bought one of my oldest shirts more than twenty years ago in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. I visit Glacier National Park every three years, but have few surviving shirts from there, although I buy several each time.

Cars: a vile public nuisance. In the part of Germany where I lived for two years, bicycling is practical for commuting, shopping, and recreation. Bike paths are everywhere. Because the driving population comprises people who are also cyclists, the biker-resentment that is obvious and prevalent among US drivers does not obtain. Now that I am back in the US, living in a bike-hostile city, most of my pedaling is on the stationary bike (we sometimes mount the bikes on a car and drive them to a bike trail). I say: tax gasoline to five dollars a gallon and spend the money building separate bike lanes. But oh, the Q-tantrums that would arise.

Recycling. Where I lived in Germany, recycling was multi-stream: bio (for compost), paper/cardboard (essentially 100% recyclable), and packaging (needing more complicated recycling). The small left-over fraction is actual garbage. Granted, a trivial amount of intelligence and effort are required to successfully recycle in Germany. In the US, where using one’s brain and not shitting in everybody’s living room is considered (by Q’s) to be communist socialist liberty-hatred, even where recycling is supposedly available it has to be dumbed down to “single stream”, which doesn’t really work. A few (“liberty” loving!) defeqtors tossing unrecyclable crap into the stream taints it so that it has to be relegated to landfills.

Liberian Units. The US is officially metric, as the yard and pound were redefined in terms of the metric system in 1959. You wouldn’t know it from simple observation, although there are bizarre exceptions (e.g. the so-called-free market has somehow blessed two liters as a standard size for beverage packaging). Still, even though the paleo-units are “officially” metric, any sort of design work not intended for just one of the two mensuration provinces requires time-wasting pain in the ass doubling of effort just to kiss the ass of the baqkwards foot-draggers.

How to set things right? The one thing the Q’s aren’t failures at is cheating and tantrum-throwing until they get their way, like the spoiled children of exasperated parents. It’s galling, but the grownups have to decide to spend a much greater amount of their time and effort suppressing and cauterizing Q bullshit. Maybe after a generation or two of enforced maturity, we can lighten up on the medicine.