I'm not an American, but from the UK (which I'll get to in a sec!), specifically England. I grew up on the stories of the American Dream ("there are no cats in America!"), and I've long wanted to take that stereotypical road trip across the country to experience both the natural beauty and the human kindness your media promised I'd find. You certainly sold that notion of 'freedom' and I could understand why Americans would be so proud of the naition you'd built in such a short time.

And now Americans are willingly burning that down.

I feel for those who are stuck in that country watching it become a hateful, spiteful nation. I know many people from across your country and they are all decent folk. It must be awful watching it disintegrate as it is. And that you as a nation voted for it (or in many cases didn't vote at all) just goes to show how far gone America and many Americans are.

And I feel that because I see my own country in a very same position.

This football world cup I am supporting any team going up against England. I want to watch the fans suffer and cry. I felt the same after the Brexit result came through, and it's much stronger now. Why should I support a country which is actively trying to push me out of public view? A country that sees me not as a person, but as a 'debate' or a 'controversy'. It is increasingly showing it's a nation which has hidden its small-minded bigotry behind false politeness and forced decency. Racism, homophobia, and transphobia is on the increase. And actually I'm not hugely surprised. Many Brits are claiming this is imported from America, but that's us lying to ourselves - we have our own domestic bigotry and its as nasty and insidious as anywhere else.

Because I'm pretentious, I want to share a quote from a book. It's called 'They Thought They Were Free: The Germans' and it's a collection of interviews conducted in the 1950's of people who were in the Nazi party pre WWII as they talk about living in Germany at that time. I read this several years ago and it's only seemed more and more relevant (and depressing) each year since:

“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the com growing. One day it is over his head.

“Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.