Yes, America has sucked!

My fellow Americans, it breaks my heart to inform you that our country has not been perfect in the past.
Yes, despite all of our greatness and ideals, we too have had our atrocities. We have treated an entire race like animals; we forced them to work in the cotton fields at the height of the summer 14 or so hours a day, and whipped them when they did not work hard enough. Or, if we so preferred, we instead forced them to work in such places as naileries, where teenage boys labored by a furnace: again, in the hottest days of the summer. And when we decided that a certain one of our cattle was unfit for work, or caused too much trouble, we would sell it off without warning -- never to be seen again by their mothers, or sisters or brothers, or sons or daughters.
Our sense of American exceptionalism, the idea that the white American "Anglo-Saxon race" especially popular in the 1800's, was the driving force behind our westward expansion. Manifest Destiny was the belief that God had singled us out to settle the entire continent, that we were destined to usurp the land of the Native Americans. And so, yes, when we were opposed, we fought wars, we forced the natives west, or we killed them.
We have practiced eugenics. We have committed genocide. We have bombed entire countries to cinders.
Jim Crow. Father Coughlin. Agent Orange. These are names you should know as well as you should know Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Abraham Lincoln.
I am proud to be an American. We have generally been a force of good in the world; but I know our past. Stop the fucking nationalist bullshit, this idea that we have always been in the right, have never done anything wrong, and are morally superior to every other country. That is not the ideal behind our foundation -- that all men are created equal.
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Yes, despite all of our greatness and ideals, we too have had our atrocities. We have treated an entire race like animals; we forced them to work in the cotton fields at the height of the summer 14 or so hours a day, and whipped them when they did not work hard enough. Or, if we so preferred, we instead forced them to work in such places as naileries, where teenage boys labored by a furnace: again, in the hottest days of the summer. And when we decided that a certain one of our cattle was unfit for work, or caused too much trouble, we would sell it off without warning -- never to be seen again by their mothers, or sisters or brothers, or sons or daughters.
Our sense of American exceptionalism, the idea that the white American "Anglo-Saxon race" especially popular in the 1800's, was the driving force behind our westward expansion. Manifest Destiny was the belief that God had singled us out to settle the entire continent, that we were destined to usurp the land of the Native Americans. And so, yes, when we were opposed, we fought wars, we forced the natives west, or we killed them.
We have practiced eugenics. We have committed genocide. We have bombed entire countries to cinders.
Jim Crow. Father Coughlin. Agent Orange. These are names you should know as well as you should know Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Abraham Lincoln.
I am proud to be an American. We have generally been a force of good in the world; but I know our past. Stop the fucking nationalist bullshit, this idea that we have always been in the right, have never done anything wrong, and are morally superior to every other country. That is not the ideal behind our foundation -- that all men are created equal.
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