But still you guys aren’t hearing my issue or I’m not explaining it properly. Why does it take so much to ignite protests in America when other countries are more prone to protest? What does it take for Americans to come together and to want more from their community leaders. It’s a showerthought not an objective statement so it’s evolving and I do regret that I posted it with the question of if it were a framing difference because it I’d not on topic for what my overall question was about . That’s on me, my b.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Individualist vs collectivist cultural differences? Lack of a good social safety net is likely another reason. When are you going to protest? People are crazy busy just working enough hours to feed and house themselves and their families. Maybe you can plan your protesting between in the 30 minutes before you need to pick up your kid from school/daycare before you take them home and start cooking dinner for them. Are you going to skip work to protest? You could lose your job and then you can’t feed and house your family.
I’d also say that here in the USA protest need massive involvement by the populace to even get noticed. Very rarely does a single issue resonate with a large enough group of people to get critical mass for outside attention.
I can’t name a single person in my area I’d consider a “community leader”.
KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 5 weeks ago
The geography is also a huge contributor. To protest something on a national scale needs significantly greater buy-in from the country as a whole than protesting something on a national scale in a European country. We have a huge amount of land area over here and with the exception of major cities, we’re very spread out.
Spain is one of the larger European countries, and is about 500k sq. km, as an example. The US is about 9.1 million sq. km.
Protests happen on local scales but they don’t make national news, only the really massive ones do, and those require a lot of coordination and time investment from the participants just to show up.
davidgro@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Just to add to your point, as far as I can find, the entire European Union is only about 4.3 million sq. km.
If Spain were added as a 51st US State it would be the 3rd largest, between Texas and California. Same with France (largest in the EU), but it’s much closer to overtaking 2nd place. I had no idea those countries were so large.
Still, we have 50 of those country sized areas.