It'd be interesting to see the results of a poll: 1. Do you wear a mask to protect against transmission of Covid? 2. Are you in favor of repealing Roe v Wade to force people who are pregnant to go through months of painful, risky and expensive medical procedures? #

I started reading Heather Cox Richardson's How the South Won the Civil War and I can tell it's going to be another transformative reading for me. There's a basic bug in the American myth of self-reliance, the bug is this -- it's a lie. Humanity is like an ant colony. Our lives follow a rigid template that's hard impossible to break out of. Unless you're a hermit, you pay taxes, get the same medicine as everyone else, celebrate the same holidays (even non-Christians in the US observe Christmas in some fashion). You are only unique in your mind, but even there, where you are free to be different, there's a lot of conformity. We rely on each other, there is no such thing as a pioneer on the open range, fending for himself. Richardson doesn't say any of those things, at least not in the beginning of the book, instead she describes the American myth. And as I'm reading it, I recognize it as the argument between the people and the oligarchs that's still raging. We think of it as North vs South but that's all part of the puppetry. We're being manipulated into blaming each other for nothing, distracting us from what we could be if we didn't pander to the oligarchs. Really looking forward to this read.#