Why assume most Americans have seen NYC or other major cities though? Most of us don’t ever make enough money to travel this country’s hard-to-imagine-how-big-it-actually-is vastness, or even enough to leave our hometowns for longer than a couple days before financial woes start nipping at the mind, if not worse.
This is not to say I think it’s a reasonable conclusion to think 30% of our population is in any of these three areas of course. That is silly and requires a very skewed view of things (which, lucky us, is easily provided by any number of increasingly ‘official’ seeming news sources that really just deal in intentional fear mongering and reductionism). Most people tend to believe whatever is put before them, and we have a system that has been explicitly set up to present false images of reality to US citizens. Propaganda to keep the propaganda machine running, right? As unreasonable as it is, it also makes sense that people could be duped into believing it because this system so many of us are stick within is hellbent on ensuring that we are intentionally conditioned out of the ability to know better by adulthood. It doesn’t work on everyone, but it works well enough that’s it’s perpetuation is currently one of the highest yielding economies this foolish country has to offer.
The line of thought that seems obvious and reasonable to you and me has been intentionally beaten out of countless people here before they even had a chance to understand how to think rationally. I don’t know how to fix these things. It is just so obvious to me from this inside vantage that the stupidity of our country is one that has been intentionally manufactured and amplified at the expense of us, the actual people the same system depends on and revolves around keeping ignorant.
Sorry for the rant. Many Americans are dumb. Most of the ones that are never had a real option to be anything else because of how fucked things are here. That’s not intended as an excuse, but as an attempt at an explanation tbc
Many rural areas in the US still don’t even have internet access except for the wealthiest homes/neighborhoods among them. And, as we share this exchange, many more are actively ontheir way to losing access to the same, simply because, regardless of the cost on us, our government has decided to put that money into the pockets of people that do not need it. I grew up in an area where the internet was assumed to be only for the wealthy because things were just that stuck in time due to the blatant misallocation of government funding and the greedy fucks that ensured things would be this way. That’s the same government that ran this poll, right? So if we both know, for different reasons and in different ways, that this government can not be trusted, why trust them to give you accurate data on this topic?
The issue with data points like this is that they imply an assumption of completion that simply can not actually exist because of how incredibly large our population is. There is no way to wrangle all of these cats into taking the same singular poll in order to get truly accurate numbers, so accepting these numbers without any skepticism is, at best, an assumption based on a lack of information, much like how some people can believe that a disproportionate amount of people live in unreasonably small areas. Think about the people in those underpriveleged rural areas I mentioned up top. How many of them do you believe were asked or invited to take this poll? How many of them never had a chance to due to lack of access? How many do you think chose not to participate because of their frustration with how things are and the people that made it this way? How many do you think refused because they just couldnt care less?Why assume that these factors should not be considered when trying to get a clear and true understanding of how things are here for the common people?