Anyone can sell you a narrative. You don’t have to buy it.

If you buy it, it resonates. That’s the whole trick. And if it’s a shitty narrative, that resonance often means hating other people. Looking down on them. Deciding who counts and who doesn’t.

Ask yourself why that story landed on you the way it did. If you’re a parent and you bought it, what are you teaching your kids right now, today, without saying a word.

This isn’t about politics. It’s about what the story is actually made of.

I think this country was built on instant gratification. Optics. Entertainment. The next upgrade, the bigger house, the bigger portions, the fastest way to make money. All of it gets branded as freedom. All of it gets branded as success.

If you’ve lived in other countries, you start to notice the difference. Smaller portions. Less chaos. Sundays that actually belong to family. Boundaries that hold. Respect that doesn’t need to be demanded because it’s already there.

Here, freedom has come to mean saying anything hateful because it’s your right. Not listening, because you’ve already decided you’re right. I don’t think you need a degree to see this differently. I think you need to sit with whatever you’re running from, the thing that won’t let your mind go quiet unless you’re chasing the next title, the next car, the next badge to pin on your chest.

All of it is temporary. Who you are when no one’s watching is who you actually are.

I grew up somewhere else, with a different set of values, so I didn’t inherit this one by default. I got the comparison for free. I’m not defending the version of my own culture that swallows things and puts on a face either. The pull toward Western expression is real, and it’s earned. Expression is a right. It’s just not a license to abuse people with it.

There’s a middle path. Discipline, respect, and care, applied everywhere, not just where it’s convenient. Politics. Work. Family. It has to be taught, on purpose, or it doesn’t show up on its own.

This country isn’t lacking freedom. It’s lacking a compass. Those aren’t the same thing, and mistaking one for the other is how we got here.