A Thought Experiment For An Awful 4th of July

Things feel “over” in the United States right now. The truth is both better and worse than that.

Jumana Abu-Ghazaleh
9 min readJul 1, 2022
Photo by Ludovic Gauthier on Unsplash

Sitting on a park bench

That’s older than my country

Minus The Bear, “Absinthe Party At The Fly Honey Warehouse

Right now, in the United States, things feel over.

This is not a sentiment exclusively held by one or another subset of society — it’s pretty damn near ubiquitous. In January, a new NPR/Ipsos poll found that seven in ten Americans feel the US was “in crisis and at risk of failing”.

In fact, when you look at the poll report itself, it’s even more striking:

“A majority, regardless of their gender, racial/ethnic group, generation, or region of the country, feel that America is in crisis and at risk of failing. There is also broad consensus among Democrats (68%), Republicans (79%), and independents (67%) on this.”

This start-of-2022 poll was, of course, taken nearly half a year before the end of Roe. Or any of the other horrors of the last six months…

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Jumana Abu-Ghazaleh

Founder @ Pivot For Humanity. Published in Fast Company, OneZero, IEEE Technology + Society. Board member. Palestinian. Start with empathy, always.