I’m Afraid of Americans

There’s a song about it.

Jessica Wildfire
6 min readSep 20, 2021

No one needs anyone. They don’t even just pretend.
— David Bowie

Anger is poison.

America is the angriest country in the world. We’re angry all the time, and we don’t even see it. David Bowie did. In 1997 he released a song with Nine Inch Nails titled, “I’m Afraid of Americans.”

Almost 25 years later, the music video portrays what it feels like for millions of us now, every single time we step outside.

Bowie couldn’t have predicted our future any better. Two years after its release, the Columbine shooting happened. A couple of years after that, terrorists flew planes into our tallest buildings.

We’ve been at war ever since. If we weren’t fighting terrorists, we’ve been fighting each other. It never stops.

Now that we’re not officially at war anymore, we’re in trouble. There’s no more enemies to fight. We’re too broke to invade anyone.

Our anger has nowhere to go but inside.

This is what it looks like:

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