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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   24604 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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I was an edgy, America-hating 16 year old. I was excited to finally be living in interesting times. I posted some things that were stupid and probably hurtful. Those sentiments are probably fairly mainstream today.

I asked my English teacher who she thought did it. She said it might have been white supremacist militias. My father scoffed at that. It took me another decade to notice that some people are much better predictors than others.

I wasn't an edgy America-hater, but I didn't feel viscerally that I had been personally attacked. In small-town Pacific Northwest I felt like big cities like New York got all the attention and we were an afterthought. I remember thinking that the inner city schools depicted on TV shows often looked much nicer than my schools. Now I'm sure in reality they were far worse to attend, but they also got a lot more funding and attention than Small Town High.

I'd never been to New York at that time. Since then I've connected through JFK but never stepped outside the airport.

I just didn't feel much kinship with such distant parts of the country. An attack on Seattle probably would've registered emotionally even though at that point I'd been on the ground in Seattle only a couple of times, always for school field trips.

I think my post-college civic self eduation instilled a better sense of myself as an individual contributor to and part owner of the great American project. I'd be on board with dropping bombs if a terrorist attacked a pelican in Myrtle Beach. But 22ish years ago I agreed with Kerry that the response should have been closer to a law enforcement action than a war.

my story is very similar.

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