"...news"

I try very hard to avoid the news, and opinions. However as we know these are everywhere. This as endless algorithms are trying to make money off us by sorting us into niche boxes.

I'm trying it arrange my computer to filter these out,...not easy. Still I just logged on, and was presented with a liberal bubble post. These constructed to keep me hating the right. The right bubbles do the same for anything left.

Anyway to make me hate my country it just smeared a post in my face. This saying most Americans don't know that Puerto Rico is part of the United States, and it's people citizens. 

This playing into the xenophobia of the times.

The current president didn't know that. ...still doesn't buy it. Early in his administration one of the judges he tried to appoint didn't know exactly where or if Hawaii was a State.
This doesn't mean these are necessarily evil people...though #45 is clearly emotionally disturbed.

This just means they're Americans.

The truth is, and cruel statistics bear this out. Americans are mostly a functionally illiterate people. Geologic illiteracy is common along with scientific, and cultural. It's who we are. We are an insular people. 

I imagine this comes from the beneath the skin tradition of having left the Old World, and it's chaos behind.

We're a friendly folk one that on the surface goes with fair play,...for some if they're the right color or religion. 

However we are incurious. 

We tend to be only interested in our lives what's in front of us. The rest is too much trouble confusing, and none of our business.

For all of our history we were isolationist.

Even WW1 didn't change that as we refused to join the League of Nations. It was only the vast world trauma of the international Great Depression, and WW2 that forced us into the world. Inheriting an empire forced us to stay for near 80 years.

We never liked it.

I so well recall growing up how so many wanted to leave the United Nations, and kick it out of New York. This was, and is a common feeling outside of the Cosmopolitan Bantustans in this country.

This is why we have so quickly embraced the world wide wave of nationalisms. It's not #45 or his red caps,...it's just who most of us are.
It's in the bedrock of white America,...which isn't the only America.

On the other hand.

There are regions of rationality, and internationalism here,...always was. Even from colonial times. It's just that for now these interests are not at the helm. ...but will be again.

Near half of the people think they're getting their country back. The rest fear the approach of a dark age. ...that's the divide.

We'll see where this goes.