*note: in my daily life I make it a practice not to say ‘America’, because there isn’t just one, but for the purposes of this article I may say it so as to be more understood.
In recent years, a lot of people have asked me what it is that I dislike so much about the US, and while my knee-jerk response is to say “everything”, in light of all that’s been happening in the world recently I’ve had plenty of time to really sit with it and identify some more particular reasons.
The main one that comes up for me every time is the lack of care that people in the US have for anyone (or anything) else in the world. I could almost understand if it were a country like, say, Iceland which is rated the world’s most peaceful country, but on the contrary we are talking about the country that causes the absolute most damage everywhere in the world all the time. The U.S. has been at war for its entire 200 year history, and the US citizens who could care less are the ones who fund it.
Now, I recognise that this is by design but I just can’t make excuses for it anymore in the age of the Internet. And if your argument is that you’re too busy making money to support yourself, to me that makes it even worse. You pay into systems with your time and labour that not only don’t benefit you but actively harm others, AND THEN you scream from the rooftops that your country is the best in the world. You, who are one sickness away from being homeless and one lay off away from missing your mortgage payment. You who spend very little time with your family and friends because you’ve isolated yourself from community in exchange for loneliness in your big houses.
The money you put into the system provides you with basically nothing. You pay tolls to drive on roads, you pay to go into a public park, you pay taxes on everything, you pay to park, you pay service workers “tips” (aka you pay their salaries) after already paying for the service, you pay HOAs to regulate you, you pay monthly insurance AND copays, you pay significantly more for literally everything, and you produce nothing but waste that often gets shipped off to countries that get destroyed as a result. You contribute the most to environmental pollution and watch other countries that don’t, pay the price for it.
You spend little to nothing on developing your infrastructure and spent almost $1 trillion dollars on war last year alone. That’s $1,000,000,000,000, which is more than the next nine countries’ spending combined.
Other things the average US citizen doesn’t care about:
- Other people
- Their neighbours
- Their health
- Their own benefits and wellbeing
- Their infrastructure
- Their failing systems (especially education)
- People who don’t look like them
- Learning about the world
- Trying to be better people
- Learning in general
Here are some other things the U.S. could have invested money into instead of the $174 billion it has spent on funding Israel’s genocide since 2023:
- Public Infrastructure (roadways, bridges, affordable housing, affordable healthcare, outdoor gathering spaces, national parks, public transportation, upgrading the electric grid, improving wastewater systems, better phone and internet service, city planning, public education)
- Industry and innovation (factories, energy, technology, food production/farming, construction)
- Environment (reducing waste, simple things like banning plastic/styrofoam containers, ending mono-cropping aka practicing permaculture, better farming practices, better energy rating for houses, cars, appliances, more robust guidelines for reducing environmental destruction and waste management, community gardens, shifting from manicured lawns to useable gardens in support of not only food security but local pollinators, replanting trees)
These are just a few things that come to mind—and I’m not expert. Yet, according to the experts:
“The United States generally lags behind its peers in the developed world. Some analysis shows the quality of U.S. infrastructure compared to its peers steadily declining [PDF] over the past two decades. U.S. infrastructure spending also ranks toward the bottom among Group of Twenty (G20) countries.
U.S. infrastructure performance suffers from its comparatively low quality, with consequences for businesses, workers, and travelers. U.S. passenger trains average just half the speed of Europe’s high-speed rails. Airport rankings published by aviation research firm Skytrax put only five U.S. airports in the top fifty worldwide, with the highest ranking, Seattle-Tacoma, coming in at number eighteen.
When it comes to internet access, the United States ranks sixteenth among countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in fixed broadband coverage, though it reaches third in mobile coverage. At the same time, Americans pay more than their European peers.”
And for those who love to say things like, ‘well we have better healthcare systems’ because some friend of theirs went to a so called “third world country” and got sick and didn’t like the public (free!) healthcare system, I just ask why is that always the story? Why not compare to other developed nations? It’s easy to win that argument when your comparison is uneven.
So here’s a more even comparison:
“Despite spending nearly twice as much per capita on healthcare compared to similarly large and wealthy nations, the United States has a lower life expectancy than peer nations and the gap has grown for some measures since the COVID-19 pandemic. “
Other points to note from said article:
- The U.S. has fewer general health practitioners than most peer nations
- Life expectancy in the U.S. has rebounded to nearly pre-pandemic levels, but remains far below peer countries
- Maternal mortality rates in the U.S. are much higher than in peer countries
- Hospital admissions for congestive heart failure and diabetes were more frequent in the U.S. than in comparable countries, on average
- Obstetric trauma during vaginal delivery is more common in the U.S. than in most comparable countries, especially when medical instruments are involved
- Americans are less likely to have a regular place of care than peer countries, on average
This doesn’t even talk about obesity, food quality, drug overdose, overuse of antibacterial products, or any of the other life-affecting factors such as less movement and less time for self, less socialising, and lack of third spaces that contribute to a terrible quality of life overall. In Montessori, we call it the “prepared environment” and the prepared environment as it is today is not conducive to a good quality of life. Yet, people will stand on top of that hill and die for what they think is “better” than everywhere else.
Surely, this is just a coping mechanism for an otherwise crippling feeling of hopelessness?
And speaking of environment, I have to reiterate that the US produces more waste than countries twice its population size. People from other countries remain shocked at the fact that so many ‘Americans’ eat from paper plates and drink from plastic cups in their own homes (mine included). It takes very little thought process to recognise that this is an absolutely unnecessary contribution to waste (that is mismanaged, nonetheless. The US recycles less than 5% of its plastic waste). And the contribution of waste stems from one thing: laziness. This seems to be the undertone for many of the things that happen here (or don’t). People are just too lazy to care. (Remember I wrote about the Microwave Generation years go? Look at us now.)
Fine, you’re an elder and it’s hard for you to change your ways. I grapple with this with my own parents, whom I have been begging to stop buying plastic water bottles for years upon years. But if you’re young enough to want or already have young children, how can you care about them and not care about the world they are inheriting? It’s undeniable the environmental crisis we are facing and how it will continue to affect our world. Why do you not care enough to do something?
Why does it not bother you? Why aren’t you angry? Why aren’t you protesting corporations?
Right now, the US government wants to end food aid benefits for those who need it (majority of whom, by the way, are white). Right now, while it throws away nearly $400 BILLION DOLLARS in food waste every year, the priority is to take from people who can”t afford food. That is $400,000,000,000 in food waste, which significantly contributes to the production of methane gas, a major contributor to climate change. Schools are literally fundraising so they can feed the children who walk through their doors.
Why are you not angry!?
This, my friends, is just an introduction to my thought process and why I have absolutely no time for people who refuse to open their eyes. I will no longer argue with anyone who defends a system that doesn’t care one bit about them or their family members and that has ravaged the world in unforgivable ways for 2 hundred years.
It’s just intolerable for me. Hearing the way people speak and the things they ‘care’ about quite literally makes me feel nauseated. I just want to scream from the rooftops to wake people up, but I always know that I am simply screaming into the void. I felt this way living here. And I feel it even more so now that I have left. I don’t want to be part of it. I don’t want to be associated with it. And I certainly don’t want to pay into it.
