I see, yeah i don’t live in US i live in north africa and the first difference i spotted is the propaganda aspect, here there’s of course nationalist propaganda and corruption and indoctrination but there’s a hard line drawn on government, it’s like we’re us, we suck, we’re horrible and we’re mind controlled, but it’s all ours, even the mind control, meanwhile the government all of it is “them”, no one ever mixes the government with the identity of the people not even the flag is theirs, they’re just our bosses

So struggle and resistance is natural, riots or protests is something you’d bring your friends over to or tell your family about not something to avoid or hide

I actually got told once that a riot was taking place over death of someone(it wasn’t even caused by the government they just used it as an excuse to bring old wage cuts as an issue) and they told me if i wanted to come and i did! I picked them up and some snacks and we went over to just record from a distance and cheer, you don’t get to see this very often, the police also are brutal and they sometimes attack people with vehicles but when the the riots become public they generally stop escalating, maybe they also don’t get paid enough for this or are just told to stop, normally they’re pretty awful and don’t even follow laws as is, they also avoid killing people directly while controlling the riots because someone from us dying is bad enough to start riots, someone dying while rioting is when many public workers just leave on coincidentally timed vacations, i genuinely don’t think they organize it either they just know they’ll get away with free days because chaos is guaranteed to take place, the government also knows that it’s best to have riots last days than to crack down and have a complete shut down of the country because they know we absolutely hate them

Also when people generally tell others about how bad the riots are or protestors get treated it’s always in a sympathetic way and are always told to remember the original cause rather than focusing on the damage unless there was theft from small businesses everyone looks down on that because they’re us

I didn’t understand the idea that you could love governments at all until you brought up propaganda for it, it’s so normalized here to have a clear separation of pro country and pro government even when every radio station, TVs and media outlet is blasting pro government agenda and most buildings having pro government pictures or banners, people just look at you weird if you take any of it seriously or remind you how to think properly when it’s a 1 one 1, you only take it seriously infront of “them”, and they’re not us

We also struggle to eat here, sometimes water or electricity just go out due to strain, most meals are more like snacks, but because we’re so poor it’s actually unprofitable for the large fast food manufacturers to set up shop here so the small businesses like street stalls or stands still give you meals for cheap, i’m not sure how this works in the US since you said people struggle to feed kids, also not to be rude but i think feed is exaggerated sometimes, i only really need loaf of bread and tuna can twice a day and some water/juice and i usually call it being fed for the day

But yeah! We don’t actually coordinate anything here people are just extremely angry and that shared anger and the us vs them is what coordinates us, everyone makes sure to turn the country into an ungoverned zone if anything more is taken