The perspective from the other side...

[elfs]

Frothy, with grains of truth:

I am an American, and I escaped from the prison you call home.

Everyone in Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand has a single-payer system. If they get sick, they can devote all their energies to getting well. If you get sick, you have to battle two things at once, your illness and the fear of financial ruin.

Much of the beef you eat has been exposed to fecal matter in processing. Your chicken is contaminated with salmonella. Your stock animals and poultry are pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics. In most other countries, the government would act to protect consumers from this sort of thing; in the United States, the government is bought off by industry to prevent any effective regulations or inspections. In a few years, the majority of all the produce for sale in the United States will be from genetically modified crops, thanks to the cozy relationship between Monsanto Corporation and the United States government. Worse still, due to the vast quantities of high-fructose corn syrup Americans consume, fully one-third of children born in the United States today will be diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes at some point in their lives.

If you show any sign of life when you’re young, they’ll put you on Ritalin. Then, when you get old enough to take a good look around, you’ll get depressed, so they’ll give you Prozac. If you’re a man, this will render you chemically impotent, so you’ll need Viagra to get it up. Meanwhile, your steady diet of trans-fat-laden food is guaranteed to give you high cholesterol, so you’ll get a prescription for Lipitor. Finally, at the end of the day, you’ll lay awake at night worrying about losing your health plan, so you’ll need Lunesta to go to sleep.

With a diet guaranteed to make you sick and a health system designed to make sure you stay that way, what you really need is a long vacation somewhere. Unfortunately, you probably can’t take one. I’ll let you in on little secret: if you go to the beaches of Thailand, the mountains of Nepal, or the coral reefs of Australia, you’ll probably be the only American in sight. And you’ll be surrounded crowds of happy Germans, French, Italians, Israelis, Scandinavians and wealthy Asians. Why? Because they’re paid well enough to afford to visit these places AND they can take vacations long enough to do so.

The fact is, they work you like dogs in the United States. This should come as no surprise: the United States never got away from the plantation/sweat shop labor model and any real labor movement was brutally suppressed.

Why would anyone put up with this? Ask any American and you’ll get the same answer: because America is the freest country on earth. If you believe this, I’ve got some more bad news for you: America is actually among the least free countries on earth. Your piss is tested, your emails and phone calls are monitored, your medical records are gathered, and you are never more than one stray comment away from writhing on the ground with two Taser prongs in your ass.

Let’s face it: the United States is like the former Yugoslavia – a collection of mutually antagonistic cultures united in name only. You’ve got your own version of the Taliban: right-wing Christian fundamentalists who actively loathe the idea of secular Constitutional government. You’ve got a vast intellectual underclass that has spent the last few decades soaking up Fox News and talk radio propaganda, eager to blame the collapse on Democrats, gays and immigrants. You’ve got a ruthless ownership class that will use all the means at its disposal to protect its wealth from the starving masses.

On top of all that you’ve got vast factory farms, sprawling suburbs and a truck-based shipping system, all of it entirely dependent on oil that is about to become completely unaffordable. And you’ve got guns. Lots of guns. In short: the United States is about to become a very unwholesome place to be.

You should leave.

Comments

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Having read the original source, I found this line to be egregiously missing from your post, and stunningly true:

"Your jobs aren’t secure. Your company has no loyalty to you. They’ll play you off against your coworkers for as long as it suits them, then they’ll get rid of you."

Do you know any Canadian expats? Ask them about this. They'll tell you all about America's culture of competition. As much as Canadian and American cultures are alike, it is this that is most jarring to Canadians who emigrate there. It's like everyone wants to stab everyone else in the back to get ahead, including your employer, who's using that culture against you. So that he can stab you in the back.

[tagryn]

* Switzerland is worse re: competition at work. Very, very cutthroat, to an extent that even competitive Americans find uncomfortable. Ditto for freedoms: if the fellow considers America one of the least-free countries, he needs to try living under Swiss laws for a while.

* One thing the writer doesn't touch on, presumably because it isn't an issue for them, is that racial prejudice can be pretty extreme elsewhere (and moreover, treated as acceptable) compared to the USA. Not saying we Yankees don't have problems, but Europe for someone who is dark-skinned can be a much different experience than for a Caucasian.

* Elf cut out the middle-bottom part of the essay, which gets conspiracy-theory heavy. I can see why the writer left if he thinks all that is true, but I think he underestimates the value of transparency. He also lost a lot of credibility when he states that the USA is one of the most corrupt countries on Earth - I think he needs to travel more in developing countries before drawing that conclusion.

* Comparing countries is more a matter of tradeoffs, than of one place being better than another on all things. Those of us in the West who are middle-class and up, with education and personal resources and have transferable skills, have the option to migrate if we wish, and we should be thankful for that: most of the world's population don't have that as a realistic option.

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

There is no conflict between Switzerland being less free than the US and the US being one of the least free countries.

[tagryn]

Only if we're comparing free Western democracies to one another, not compared to the rest of the world. According to the Freedom House "levels of freedom" metrics for 2009, the U.S. ranks among the top 50 out of ~200 ranked countries, and was categorized in the top "Free" category with the highest 1.0 rating. Putting the U.S. in the same category as a Zimbabwe, Iran, or Libya, not to mention places like North Korea or Myanmar/Burma, as "one of the least free" would just be an ignorant assertion to make.

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

Now that's actually an argument. "Switzerland is less free" is not.

[tagryn]

I think the mystery is why the USA isn't more like Switzerland: both have the melting-pot phenomena of being a mix of different cultures, and in that situation it makes sense to have laws which cover all areas of conduct, since leaving behavior to societal mores may not work as well as it would in more homogeneous nations (e.g. Scandinavia) where everyone "knows" how to act through acculturation while growing up.