What Do People Actually Want?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Friday, May 2, 2025 23:09
VIEWED: 1377
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I think this is a pretty good answer to Sig's question that never gets answered when she asks "What are American's Best Interests?"
Funny that the best answer I've seen to the question comes out of the UK, but they've got it a hell of a lot worse right now than we do.
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Interesting.
A few observations and questions ...
You have to be of a certain age before you feel nostalgic. Young people haven't laid down enough memories and experienced enough displacement, so they can't compare "now" "then" and can't experience a longing for what once was.
Do Americans really develop a sense of belonging? The feeling of "home" was very important in European communities "back then". "Home" was/is important to my dad, and my husband. It was a place, a community, a culture. I inherited that, and still feel displaced and uprooted in LA, decades after leaving home. Sis moved back after having lived in Colorado and Texas and, curiously, most of my cousins moved back after having lived in Delaware and California. There are a couple of cousins we lost track of, one bc he was a hellraiser and always getting in trouble, and another bc she was lesbian long before it was fashionable, so maybe they never really felt "at home".
In my sis' neighborhood, people have lived there for decades. They know each other, help each other thru the blizzards, and have gotten to be neighborly... even the hardcore MAGA Republicans stuck in moderate Democrat territory. This constant moving about for jobs or "trading up" houses doesn't help the feeling of belonging.
That sense of belonging, and nostalgia for it, might come from having had a decent stable childhood. It's hard to feel nostalgic for something that was, as he says, indifferent or abusive.
So, can people feel nostalgia for what they never knew?
And, having dissected the feeling of "belonging", once basic needs are met, maybe it's comprised of familiarity and acceptance and security and mutual commitment? IDK, I can only look at this from my very personal POV.
What say you?
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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I didn't view his video as necessarily referring to your immediate family unit. In fact, I didn't even consider he was actually referring to a physical home, as in the house you would share with them.
That's part of it, but I think he was hinting more along the lines of being in a place where you share the same history with those around you. Where there's a social code that is more or less unspoken.
I remember my grandpa talking about it when I was a little kid and he'd say we never even used to bother locking the front door, but not these days. And that's funny to me, because despite what the newspapers might have been telling him to say stuff like that, I never felt unsafe as a kid. Being latchkey kids, we'd be outside all the time, blocks or even miles from home on some days, and everything was just fine.
Now every place that I grew up (there were quite a few) are all ghetto shitholes. Nothing is safe. Nowhere is safe.
And the last 20 years the Media and the Democratic Party have done a hell of a job letting me know that I'm a bad guy and I'm not welcome anywhere because I'm a white dude.
And I'm just left asking why that is when I've seen everywhere I grew up get destroyed by politicians.
And if you don't have a family, or you barely have a family, where is home for you if everything outside of your house is not for you anymore? There is no home.
Quote:
That sense of belonging, and nostalgia for it, might come from having had a decent stable childhood. It's hard to feel nostalgic for something that was, as he says, indifferent or abusive.
And unfortunately, that isn't true at all. It's sadly all too easy to be nostalgic for something that was indifferent or abusive. I'm glad that you appear to have lived a life that was kind enough to you to not consider this a possibility.
I don't want to go back to my specific childhood in my specific house. But I do miss the neighborhood back then. If I could go back to the 90's and live there I would.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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I can get nostalgic for places I've lived to a degree. Some places mean more to me than others. Home also meant my dad, my Blair.
Think for my dad it meant family and maybe what he knew about his family's cultures.
And for me again in some ways it means as you said a sense of belonging. Roots and I have lost that on a personal level. I've meet it in connections with others who are full First Nations and people like me, mixed blood.
Met a gentleman at the local senior centre a while ago. He is a friend of a gentleman who plays mah jong with the main group. He was talking about his heritage and I said my grandmother was in Alberta for years. The other gentleman said, "I thought she was from here"
I said again that she was American and from Montana. His friend asked for her people and I said Shoshone. He nodded and then pointed at himself and said, "Cree." Then I nodded. We understood each other.
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Quote:I know what you mean. Even tho ppl locked their doors in our neighborhood, we were "free range" children ourselves and played thru the neighborhood (until troublemakers forced the neighbors to put up fences) and biked miles from home. For quite a number of years the moms kept and eye on the kids. It was one thing being yelled at by your mom, but if somebody else's mom yelled at you, well... maybe you hid in the garage for a while!
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I didn't view his video as necessarily referring to your immediate family unit. In fact, I didn't even consider he was actually referring to a physical home, as in the house you would share with them.
That's part of it, but I think he was hinting more along the lines of being in a place where you share the same history with those around you. Where there's a social code that is more or less unspoken.
I remember my grandpa talking about it when I was a little kid and he'd say we never even used to bother locking the front door, but not these days. And that's funny to me, because despite what the newspapers might have been telling him to say stuff like that, I never felt unsafe as a kid. Being latchkey kids, we'd be outside all the time, blocks or even miles from home on some days, and everything was just fine.
Now every place that I grew up (there were quite a few) are all ghetto shitholes. Nothing is safe. Nowhere is safe.
And the last 20 years the Media and the Democratic Party have done a hell of a job letting me know that I'm a bad guy and I'm not welcome anywhere because I'm a white dude.
And I'm just left asking why that is when I've seen everywhere I grew up get destroyed by politicians.
And if you don't have a family, or you barely have a family, where is home for you if everything outside of your house is not for you anymore? There is no home.Quote:
That sense of belonging, and nostalgia for it, might come from having had a decent stable childhood. It's hard to feel nostalgic for something that was, as he says, indifferent or abusive.
And unfortunately, that isn't true at all. It's sadly all too easy to be nostalgic for something that was indifferent or abusive. I'm glad that you appear to have lived a life that was kind enough to you to not consider this a possibility.
I don't want to go back to my specific childhood in my specific house. But I do miss the neighborhood back then. If I could go back to the 90's and live there I would.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:What was mutually understood?
Originally posted by Brenda:
I can get nostalgic for places I've lived to a degree. Some places mean more to me than others. Home also meant my dad, my Blair.
Think for my dad it meant family and maybe what he knew about his family's cultures.
And for me again in some ways it means as you said a sense of belonging. Roots and I have lost that on a personal level. I've meet it in connections with others who are full First Nations and people like me, mixed blood.
Met a gentleman at the local senior centre a while ago. He is a friend of a gentleman who plays mah jong with the main group. He was talking about his heritage and I said my grandmother was in Alberta for years. The other gentleman said, "I thought she was from here"
I said again that she was American and from Montana. His friend asked for her people and I said Shoshone. He nodded and then pointed at himself and said, "Cree." Then I nodded. We understood each other.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I know what you mean. Even tho ppl locked their doors in our neighborhood, we were "free range" children ourselves and played thru the neighborhood (until troublemakers forced the neighbors to put up fences) and biked miles from home. For quite a number of years the moms kept and eye on the kids. It was one thing being yelled at by your mom, but if somebody else's mom yelled at you, well... maybe you hid in the garage for a while!
I remember when I was too young to be as far away from home as I was with my younger brother that we really had to pee and we did it on somebody's tree. We weren't even sly about it or nothing, in the middle of daylight. Running and hiding in a neighbor's yard until the coast was clear was exactly what we did.
Except for a few bad nights back in my going-out drinking days, I never did anything like that again.
Me, my brother and a buddy of mine went down to a park once with a backpack full of stuff to make torches out of because they had a huge sewer we could walk into and we wanted to see what was on the other side. We were in there for hours, trekking through knee high water with sludge underneath it with our flashlights since the torches didn't work out, but we were ready with our spray paint cans in case we had to scare away any rats.
Eventually we turned around because we started to worry that there wasn't a way out on the other side.
When we came out, we got stopped by a cop who told us somebody had a backpack with paint in it and was spray-painting graffiti. My buddy was smart though and brought clear-coat paint. I'd say he saved our asses, but come to think of it, I doubt there was any graffiti around they could have pinned on us. My neighborhood wasn't a shithole when I was a kid, and cops actually did things like approaching kids with spray paint back then.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
I can get nostalgic for places I've lived to a degree. Some places mean more to me than others. Home also meant my dad, my Blair.
Think for my dad it meant family and maybe what he knew about his family's cultures.
And for me again in some ways it means as you said a sense of belonging. Roots and I have lost that on a personal level. I've meet it in connections with others who are full First Nations and people like me, mixed blood.
Met a gentleman at the local senior centre a while ago. He is a friend of a gentleman who plays mah jong with the main group. He was talking about his heritage and I said my grandmother was in Alberta for years. The other gentleman said, "I thought she was from here"
I said again that she was American and from Montana. His friend asked for her people and I said Shoshone. He nodded and then pointed at himself and said, "Cree." Then I nodded. We understood each other.
That's cool. I never really had anything like that, although I did see glimpses of it when I was a kid with the elders of the families. I had a huge Italian family on one side, and a huge Polish family on the other side. But by the time my brothers and I were born, we were European mutts with no real claim to any of that. Didn't feel like I was really a part of either family, and we only saw them about once or maybe twice per year, so that didn't help.
But back when they were all young and starting their own families, they owned city blocks together. All the Degos in one area and the Polacks in another area. They all had a sense of culture, and similar tastes in food brought from their own countries. They had very different ways of carrying themselves around each other.
By my mom's generation they were already mixed enough that they were just "white" and my mom and dad never thought much or cared much about their history. Maybe they did, but they never talked about it.
Then your own family decides to move all over the country at some point because why not? There's no real roots anyway.
Home is gone. There's no real sense of belonging anywhere like there used to be.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:What was mutually understood?
Originally posted by Brenda:
I can get nostalgic for places I've lived to a degree. Some places mean more to me than others. Home also meant my dad, my Blair.
Think for my dad it meant family and maybe what he knew about his family's cultures.
And for me again in some ways it means as you said a sense of belonging. Roots and I have lost that on a personal level. I've meet it in connections with others who are full First Nations and people like me, mixed blood.
Met a gentleman at the local senior centre a while ago. He is a friend of a gentleman who plays mah jong with the main group. He was talking about his heritage and I said my grandmother was in Alberta for years. The other gentleman said, "I thought she was from here"
I said again that she was American and from Montana. His friend asked for her people and I said Shoshone. He nodded and then pointed at himself and said, "Cree." Then I nodded. We understood each other.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
That were both Indigenous.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
I can get nostalgic for places I've lived to a degree. Some places mean more to me than others. Home also meant my dad, my Blair.
Think for my dad it meant family and maybe what he knew about his family's cultures.
And for me again in some ways it means as you said a sense of belonging. Roots and I have lost that on a personal level. I've meet it in connections with others who are full First Nations and people like me, mixed blood.
Met a gentleman at the local senior centre a while ago. He is a friend of a gentleman who plays mah jong with the main group. He was talking about his heritage and I said my grandmother was in Alberta for years. The other gentleman said, "I thought she was from here"
I said again that she was American and from Montana. His friend asked for her people and I said Shoshone. He nodded and then pointed at himself and said, "Cree." Then I nodded. We understood each other.
That's cool. I never really had anything like that, although I did see glimpses of it when I was a kid with the elders of the families. I had a huge Italian family on one side, and a huge Polish family on the other side. But by the time my brothers and I were born, we were European mutts with no real claim to any of that. Didn't feel like I was really a part of either family, and we only saw them about once or maybe twice per year, so that didn't help.
But back when they were all young and starting their own families, they owned city blocks together. All the Degos in one area and the Polacks in another area. They all had a sense of culture, and similar tastes in food brought from their own countries. They had very different ways of carrying themselves around each other.
By my mom's generation they were already mixed enough that they were just "white" and my mom and dad never thought much or cared much about their history. Maybe they did, but they never talked about it.
Then your own family decides to move all over the country at some point because why not? There's no real roots anyway.
Home is gone. There's no real sense of belonging anywhere like there used to be.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
I've had that happen before. My mum and I were talking to an older lady that we knew and she said her grandfather was French Canadian and she was also part Cree. I asked for her grandfather's name and she said,"Pambrun." And she started spelling it and I finished it. We both stopped and looked at each other because there was a very real possibility that we were distant cousins. Her grandfather could have been my great grandfather's brother. Her grandfather stayed in Canada and again a trapper while my great grandfather went to the US. My mum just sat there a little lost. Had to explain it after to her.
My mum didn't have much family and only kept in touch really with one aunt who lived in the US in Montana. As I've said my mum's side was all white.
There were lots of Scots in the area of Alberta where my dad grew up. My grandfather, his father never lost his accent because he was always talking to a Scot. And with my grandfather selling horses in the US, my dad was able to meet some of maybe his grandmother's people and pull a little bit of our history together that he passed on to me.
I don't always get that feeling. Sometimes we make family with friends.
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