Who is willing to spend 60 to 90 minutes carefully reading 12,450 words, with technical vocabulary like "longwall mining" and "abutment load", with long sentences that contain multiple clauses?
Who has the sustained attention and intellectual curiosity needed to grasp abstract relationships between ideas and complex, multi-layered concepts, such as the tension between safety and profitability, the inherent incentives of market economies, the power imbalance between workers and owners, and the long-term systemic changes resulting from the well financed campaign to blame government and collective action for systemic market failure?
Very few people have the capacity, attention, interest or stamina to thoughtfully read an article like this and understand exactly why the wealthy mine owners wouldn't fix this problem on their own, why the market couldn't fix this problem, why it required deep expertise from a government worker to fix this problem.
It's far easier to simply parrot the idea that government is the problem, that corporations need less regulation, that tax cuts for the insanely wealthy will magically trickle down to workers, that our many serious problems can be solved by concentrating migrants and homeless in camps, that protesters should be imprisoned or killed, that democratic elections are fraudulent, that only a strongman ruler can fix it.
I support balancing the federal budget. Since the US government spends roughly twice its revenue, achieving balance would realistically require unprecedented "gutting" of some agencies.
However, I question the idea of "broad support" for such gutting. Regardless of who wins elections, the federal deficit, federal budget, federal employment rolls, federal tax code etc, have only ever increased. Nothing has interrupted this pattern for as long as I've lived.
I don't know of "broad support" for anything except complaining about it.
There's a ton of propaganda both ways; all of it is based on blowing some small fact completely out of proportion.
The US is awesome but no place is perfect.
Read that again because that is precisely what you just said to a stranger you know nothing about aside from the bits of information shared on Internet comments...which makes me super curious; who, exactly, awarded you the power to invalidate the experiences of another person simply because they did not match your own? I'd like a word with them.
As a side note, your experience is similar to many other adults living in many other countries.
No offense, but it sounds like your problem is that you spend too much time "finding stories", and end up cynical and pessimistic about the the country.
But, back in reality, the US is very wealthy, has amazing educational institutions, unlimited opportunity and guess what? Not everyone who waves the flag is a fascist or racist. Some of those people long for the way things were...just like you seem to be doing.
It's not perfect, but the US is still a great place.
Growing up, I was taught that we (the US) was the greatest country on Earth. You can only imagine my disillusionment upon entering voting-age and adulthood. The cracks in the veneer were starting to show.
Fast forward to the Obama presidency, when Hope was a selling point. By then I had no real faith in the US. I'd experienced the lingering impact of financial destitution, homelessness and addiction, which our country would rather pretend does not exist here. I'd been exposed to things that made it feel like we lived in a society that put more value in appearances than it did substance. The food turned out to be fake. The educations we were getting turned out to be a lie. The idea that one could work hard and succeed was all smoke and mirrors. Our flag was starting to be co-opted by racists and fascists, the early bubblings of the boil-over we are now experiencing. So, it was easy to see why Hope was a marketing pitch.
But these days, I am trying so hard to reclaim whatever love I can for the US. There are good people here trying to do good things, but they so easily get drowned out by the alarm bells and angry shouts, that it is difficult to see or hear them. Even my initial approach to this article was tainted by my experiences, leaving me to assume it was another "feel good" piece about something that should be normalized, but instead is treated like the exception to the cynical rule.
I will try to find more stories like this.