Miscalculating America

I was just talking with someone about the major flaw I see in the Putin plan to destabilize the U.S. for Russia’s benefit.

It is a deep misread of who the American people are. One of our big traits, and it is not a good one, is we are incredibly violent. He thinks we are decadent and weak, and maybe we are. But we are also wildly violent.

It’s like he hasn’t read about basically any decade in our history. You think America won’t hurt you even if it hurts us? Have you met an American?

We have made peace, functionally, with having more guns than people, guns that often end us. You think we hesitate to bring you with us?

As I said it is not good. Some cultures have created a word for death through overwork, or enjoying the suffering of others. The United States could coin a word for murder-suicide.

It is like Putin has never grasped the full extent and potential of America’s pathologies.

When Japan attacked a military base, that wasn’t even in a place that was a state yet, we took a few years to go from having very little standing military to figuring out how wage war on multiple continents and rebuild the surface of the sun in two of their cities. When people flew planes into buildings and a field, we dropped our entire military onto a country for 2 decades. And that was when we had compunction. That was when we’re were vaguely stable.

The Rules Based Order, things like NATO, protect our adversaries too. From us. The United States, in its relatively short life, has given the continent of Europe, a continent with a gift for armed conflict over millennia, a run for its money in the armed violence department. And in total body count.

And that was all with us being by and large content (as much as we’re capable of that).

America induces our own children to routinely engage in mass murder. That’s during prosperous and stable times. That’s just in school.

How damaging will an unstable and chaotic U.S. be. How globally catastrophic when our worst impulses no longer connect with our ideals. How bad can it get when, say, the 101st Airborne is walking through the streets of Moscow and they’re in a bad mood? When a shopping mall can become the OK corral, and we’re fine with that, imagine how we can be when we’re angry and totally unmoored. What happens when the untethered-to-American-norms commander-in-chief is having a bad week, runs out of Diet Coke and remembers we have weapons of nuclear mass destruction hard-wired to target their largest cities?

How dangerous will it be for Putin when the U.S. gets bored of trying to deport its own residents, on whom its own economy depends, and remembers Putin is an adversary, or Xi threatens the island, from which come all the chips that make our entertainment systems work, with attack and the United States gets up out of what the CCP might call a capitalist lazy stupor and remembers we can try to blockade the Strait of Malacca with 8 out of 11 carrier attack groups tied behind our back, cutting off the oil their country runs on so in perhaps weeks or months: all their trucks, planes and tanks become largely inert.

We started this country by grabbing rifles we had laying around and starting to shoot at the soldiers of the one of the most powerful empires on earth, all because they taxed our breakfast beverage.

We are not all powerful, and we are certainly not gods. But we also lack the wisdom to back down sometimes and have a proclivity to unleash violence few have ever even tried to equal. That violence often hurts us, but without our hesitation, we will hurt others too. As I said, this is not a good thing. Not even close. But it is a thing. Slow to violence and apocalyptic once we’re there.

When a giant as big as the U.S. falls, it falls on something. Putin is something. Xi is something. The 8 billion basically innocent humans on earth are all something.

We are reckless, we are selfish, we are destructive. And we know where you live.

Sure, we may damage ourselves as Russia, China and others work to destabilize us, we may be destroyed completely. But we’ll take a lot of you with us, because when we go all the way there, we probably can’t help ourselves to save ourselves, or anyone else.

© Copyright December 21, 2024, David August, all rights reserved davidaugust.com

David August is an award-winning actor, acting coach, writer, director, and producer. He plays a role in the movie Dependent’s Day, and after its theatrical run, it’s now out on Amazon (affiliate link). He has appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live on ABC, on the TV show Ghost Town, and many others. His artwork has been used and featured by multiple writers, filmmakers, theatre practitioners, and others to express visually. Off-screen, he has worked at ad agencies, start-ups, production companies, and major studios, helping them tell stories their customers and clients adore. He has guest lectured at USC’s Marshall School of Business about the Internet.