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I Don’t Envy Americans

I wouldn’t want to live in fear like you.

Taru Anniina Liikanen
4 min readMay 25, 2022
Photo by Swapnil Bhagwat on Unsplash

You don’t have to have a hot take on the internet on everything that happens. When something awful or controversial takes place, it’s fine to just let others speak about it. It’s fine to follow the conversation and not stir the pot.

That’s why I do have opinions about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but I didn’t want to have a take on Will Smith slapping Chris Rock in the Oscars, for example. There are too many cultural sensitivities I don’t know well enough as a Finn, and I don’t want to unintentionally hurt those who know better.

Not everyone agrees with me. Attention is scarce in the online world, and some are willing to say whatever just to scrape a part of it to themselves.

As the news of the most recent mass shooting in a majority Latino elementary school in Texas surfaced, some attention-hungry opinionists started having really, really bad takes.

There was Marjorie Taylor Greene suggesting this is a mental health problem, and that the solution would be, not improved health care but a return to good-old, Christian God. There was Ted Cruz sending his thoughts and prayers, as usual.

But the one that puzzled me most was blogger and journalist Matthew Yglesias, who just tweeted out support for the American

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Taru Anniina Liikanen
Taru Anniina Liikanen

Written by Taru Anniina Liikanen

Stand-up comedian and recovering political ghostwriter. Finnish by birth, porteña at heart. Bad jokes frequent.

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