I mean, I have an answer, and I get why it doesn’t make sense for people who have governments they inherently trust. But here’s how it works, basically. A large part of this country was founded by people who either didn’t have ready access to the government (like, look at the tail end of the oregon trail for example… we were explicitly giving land away for people to move here and set UP civilization, not to have access to it) or who couldn’t rely on the government they had to do the right thing. Because of this we have a sense of wanting the government to do the right thing, but never really expecting it to, and being on our own to make things in our lives right. This is why you have people in southern states going “what, we’re opening now? Fuck that, I’m staying at home” and why you have people in northern states going “What, we’re locked in for another week, but I live in a county that literally is nine hours from everything and all we have is two stores and a mcdonalds, and zero cases of corona in the county? Why is the government making us stay at home when none of us ever leave the county, have no intention of going to the city, and the state isn’t even offering funding for rural healthcare systems ANYWAY?”
And then there’s the news reports that this thing may be everywhere already anyway, meaning nobody trusts what any government is doing here.
And that’s the problem. Our education system growing up, like it or not, praises people who make change happen for the better over the government doing the right thing. More oft than not, our government is the foil, the problem. And the solution, more often than not is someone or some group of people getting together to do what they perceive to be the right thing ANYWAY.
Look at Clara Barton and the Red Cross. She basically was told multiple times that she wasn’t allowed to be a frontline doctor because, well, one, women can’t be doctors. And two, the front lines are scary and women shouldn’t be there. Field surgeons lobbied against her. She had to raise her own funds and secretly travelled to the front lines. She used corn husks as bandages because the war department thought that if they just starved her of supplies, she’d go home and knit or sew or something. Now we see her as a heroine. She’s awesome. Then? The government viewed her as an annoying lady who didn’t know her place.
And that’s the stories we tell. That’s why there’s a distrust of our government. And that’s why americans tend to cling to their rights so freaking hard, because we’re the story we tell is that we don’t trust the government.
And look at who the president is? Can you blame us?
