Quote:
Originally posted by svandamme
it's just that several folks on this board have been very vocal about how U S A is better at everything then everyone else
especially when it comes to FREEDOM® and having the best rights and what not ... liberally quoting the Constitution about everything... yet folks get beat up for having a different idea about something
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The US is really a study in contrasts. I doubt very much from your posts that this applies to you - but many of my European friends who know the US only superficially tend to view it all as somehow the same. But no country of which I'm aware contains greater extremes - intellectually, culturally, socially, politically, geographically, financially - on just about any level you care to name.
Rural Alabama is as different from the Upper East Side as rural Iraq is from Paris.
It's always difficult to generalize about America and things American when you are there.
Equally, it becomes much easier to generalize about America when you are not actually there, because all one tends to see is the ugly side of America abroad: it's consistent foreign policy disasters; it's military adventurism; it's truly corrupt administration; the infantile media - led abroad by CNN and USA Today; and the cheap and nasty pop-culture and bad taste projected abroad - to say nothing of the hordes of overweight tourists dressed in shorts, baseball caps and fanny packs who genuinely have no idea whether they are in Brussels or Budapest.
It's very easy to see the US one dimensionally from abroad as simply a $hitty place. I have a couple of good European friends for example - who have travelled to every corner of the globe - except the US. You couldn't drag them to the US.
So from where I sit the US is a paradox: it seems to have the best and the worst of everything. In many areas - truly the worst. And in many areas - truly the best. It is a nation of extremes from which the middle - the cohesive common ground - seems to be slipping away.
End of rant.