America, the land of the free, home of the brave! But there’s a sister definition, going by Amurica, the land of beer-drinking rednecks, home of the red, white trash, and blue! We can thank the Urban Dictionary for the latter. These two sentences showcase the two extremes between which the different American experiences fall.
All of those then find a home in the Facebook group called “Wow, That’s Violently American,” because, truthfully, there are very many things that scream “USA!” that are complete opposites of one another. The founder of the group previously told Bored Panda that rarely do people consider “the complexity that truly exists in this country,” overlooking the “layers upon layers of social and governmental infrastructure.”
“It’s a sign that they don’t (or won’t) view the identity of this country as associated with minority or diversity, which is a lie that reinforces divisiveness and literally excludes non-white demographics from the image of America,” they stated. “Considering the truth of our diversity as told through statistics rather than rhetoric, this country is far from only white or conservative. It’s far from that.”
Since the last conversation, the founder of the page told Bored Panda that there have been a couple of challenges that they needed to overcome, regarding issues with the social media platform as a whole. “I posted a meme captioned ‘giant wall sticker in San Antonio’ with a photoshopped image of Ted Cruz’ head on the guy in a masculine dominatrix outfit. They zucced the post and pulled a lot of tools my page had access to,” they said.
This in turn restricted the reach of the page, affecting every single post and stalling further growth. “It kind of sucks that I have practically no options that Meta/Facebook doesn’t provide me with,” they said, but the challenges don’t seem to be limited to the platform only.
Although the page has over 131k followers, with many of them loving the content, the creator has been met with a lot of criticism and outright hate. It only seems to fuel an “expectation of this page to be focused on one side.” “I always try to be mindful of how some members follow the page believing I am on their ‘side,’” they said. “There’s those that follow my page because they think I’m against them, the ones who think I agree with them, and the ones who laugh with me between the two.” At the end of the day, the goal of the page is simple: “ I just want to be a vehicle to get people to think for themselves.”
“I still stand by that I don’t seek to prescribe to people what to think with this page,” they said. “I seek to find a way to give people both sides of comedy while avoiding the pitfalls of incendiary content. I try to ensure I don’t exclude people by race from the image of America, and have been called a racist before. It gets taxing sometimes, and the struggle with Meta’s automated moderation tools and lack of support for users in my situation to pursue a dispute over content.”
Regardless of it all, America is a place many call home. “Conceived in liberty,” as Abraham Lincoln noted, “and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” the nation and its people have survived many long nights of war and trial. As Sonny Fulks states, “We fought Great Britain (twice), we fought ourselves (The Civil War), we fought the World Wars, the Korean War, and wars unspeakable since 1776” for the freedom Americans have today.
However, freedom comes with responsibility, which seems to be understated in a lot of aspects, especially when we consider recent history with the COVID-19 pandemic. “This is America and therefore I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do,” could be heard and seen in the news as mandates and restrictions fell upon Americans.
“Most of the behavior I still see plays out like people trying to find out which ‘side’ everyone else is on,” said the founder of the Facebook page. “It’s like some giant football game, and we aren’t interested in each other. We are just looking for who is wearing what jersey. It’s less about how we can all be more excellent to each other and more about who we should be excellent to.”
The divide in opinions as to what it means to have “free-speech” continues on, and the founder of the page believes that this exact debate “seems to prevail itself in so many other topics within the cultural conflict heading into 2023.”
“[S]o far as a man has a power to think, or not to think; to move, or not to move, according to the preference or direction of his own mind, so far is a man free,” stated philosopher John Locke, but what that fails to note is consequence and impact, showing freedom to be quite an individual endeavor.
The founder of “Wow, That’s Violently American” believes that ‘freedom’ as a concept is idealized and attached to rhetoric. “I think that there’s just no easy way to sit with the fact that complete freedom devolves into chaos, and oppressive regulation leaves a society marginalized and subjugated to whatever force maintains the greatest privilege within a society,” they said, arguing that the best lens to view freedom is through the lens of body autonomy, consent, and common need.
As stated in Simply Philosophy, if freedom is the essence of a person, then, consequently, it acts as a duty; man is enslaved by his freedom. “We have the relationship between the rights of a single person against the will of many, coupled with what the role of the government is to be involved in the relations between people,” stated the founder of the Facebook page.
Paul Vitols believes that to become free, we must first seek knowledge of the way things really are, and then put ourselves into the correct relationship with that knowledge. Yet, politically, the most important freedom is freedom of speech. We need this for truth, good thinking, tolerance, open-mindedness, humility, self-confidence, love, and humor.
“If there is ANYTHING I believe about American culture is that change is inevitable,” stated the founder of the Facebook page when asked about the near-future. “Instead of trying to describe the future I would predict, I want to draw on my own dreams for the future. I want to be hopeful in America, so I’ll dream of the country that can possess the largest amount of love and pride shared between people.”
However, without a shared ideal of unity between Americans, this dream will stay frayed. “In order to grasp this dream that keeps us all together, it starts with being honest with our current state of affairs. It requires humility to call out the darkness of our past, and the mistakes we must learn from,” they stated.
“It requires us to recognize that diversity comes with discomfort sometimes; we have to accept that diversity doesn’t look like a homogenous society. There is no shortcut to comfort with differences between people, and if we avoid every pain-point we avoid the truth.”
As Paul Stearns states, we develop the virtues of tolerance and open-mindedness only when we are free to hear disagreeable ideas. We develop humility when our ideas are tested in a free public arena, while self-confidence arises from those ideas that survive these tests. We love only in freedom as we learn to love others in spite of their ideas, not because of them. And we can laugh deeply only where there is freedom to potentially offend.
The whole point of the “Wow, That’s Violently American” page is to help one discover the “beautiful irony to the lives we share within this beautiful country.” And the founder of the page concluded that “inside each group of people are shreds of the greater truth, and we don’t get anything but violence and death where love and the value of life cannot prevail.”
We hope that this article didn’t offend any of you, dear Pandas, and that you’ll continue scrolling onward, upvoting your favorites. Leave us your thoughts in the comments, and I hope to see you in the next one!
