No Stupid Questions

America is a country with over 300 million people and it's bigger than Western Europe. There's going to be a lot of variance. Someone growing up wealthy in San Fransisco is going to live in a different America than someone growing up with a single waitress mother in Louisiana.

The average homicide rate in the US is 5 per 100,000. The town of Boca Raton, FL has a homicide rate of 1 (less than half of the European average of 2.5) and Baltimore / St Louis / New Orleans can sometimes reach 30+ on bad years (worse than some Brazilian and Mexican cities).

When you ask about the shitty laws, we have to remember that the US is almost like 50 different countries in one. Every single state you will have a different experience as well. In Illinois school districts kids in elementary school may take home school laptops free of charge. In Panhandle Florida the kids aren't getting that.

In Florida you can go to a one of the many kava bars or smoke shops and purchase a kilogram of kratom. If you drive through Louisiana with that kratom you can get charged with a felony comparable to being caught with heroin.

Do you get what I'm saying? There are many different Americas - even in the same geographical area. In SE Florida there are a wild mix of different ethnicities and cultures. There are Haitians, Jews, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Brazilians, Vietnamese, Jamaicans..

You can live in the same city but have a totally different experience. The Brazilians may hang out with mainly other Brazilians and go to the Brazilian restaraunts / clubs / grocery stores and not ever go to the Jewish deli that all the Jews love as a staple of the town. It's like you walk around the same area and depending on the cultural lens you put on, you experience a different reality.

HAVING SAID ALL THAT

I think America is a good country to live in. Why? Because it's better than the vast majority of the world. You earn more money. You are safer. You have more opportunities and there's better infrastructure, healthcare, etc than in vast majority of the world.

Yes, there are serious problems. Wealth inequality is splitting the country in two. Healthcare is expensive. There's an opioid epidemic. We have high rates of gun violence. Etc etc

But having come from a relatively well-off third world country, I've seen the difference in QOL first hand and it's massive. America is a good place to live.

It varies from person to person and place to place. But generally, I would say that America is a pretty good place, but not perfect and has a lot of room for improvement.

Yes, healthcare is expensive, but we have some government programs to provide cheaper care for certain groups, like the very poor, the elderly, and veterans.

Violence varies from place to place, but I feel like I live in a safe area, and I have never seen or heard a gun fired at someone in a public place.

A lot of the bad laws typically involve disenfranchising certain minority groups. I am lucky enough to not be affected by most of this, and a lot of people are fighting back against it by trying to vote in better politicians.

America is harder to live in the poorer you are, and it’s on a steeper scale than in other industrialized nations because there are fewer and less robust social services, especially health and child care, and declines in union membership have paired with a rapid increase in wealth inequality that is forcing the shrinking middle class downward and stomping on the poor even harder.

You can live a comfortable life (for now…) if you are firmly middle class and up. Your higher salary than your counterparts in Europe is eaten away at by higher costs, and you deal with risks that they don’t in the form of transportation being car dominated (more accidents and less walking exercise) easy access to guns (the most dangerous being the one in your own home, to you) and less strict food safety laws. Compared to those in Eastern Europe, however, your likelihood of suffering from a foreign attack is drastically lower, not that it was ever very high to begin with.

One thing that Americans take pride in (and rightly, mind you) and full advantage of is our First Amendment right to not have our speech be curtailed, so a large amount of the bitching about America, and especially in English, is Americans bitching about America(ns). So there’s a cultural element to it that may or may not exceed the truth.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com

tl;dr It used to be a hell of a lot better.

Yes and no. More than half the country is wanting to move in the direction of other modern nations. The trouble is we have the electoral college which was instituted as a compromise for slave holding states at the foundation of our country and which gives conservatives outsized power which has resulted in a long-term deadlock.

It's likely that as demographics shift over the next decade, this deadlock will be broken and we'll probably enter a period of rapid progress, but that's only if we make it that long. With the degree to which Republicans are either brainwashed or willfully ignoring reality for the sake of trying to gain power, it remains to be seen whether we can.

This is why Trump should get elected so he can Make America Great Again, right guys?

But in all seriousness, I imagine it's a case of that America is nowhere near as good as some Americans make it out to be, but it's also not as terrible as the media make it out to be either. You can probably apply this to most of the Western World, really.

The US healthcare system is actually even worse than people think. Employers use it to hold power over us all, and even if you have insurance the prices of everything are extremely inflated (my dad went in for back surgery and the total was $47k usd, but get this, one of the items was a single bag of saline solution----$270!), and many people including myself can't afford health insurance at all so I'm 1 accident or illness away from total financial ruin.

I genuinely love America and the place where I live. There is a lot to like and there are many places where life is much harder, but the US health system is one of those things that is embarrassingly bad and honestly just scary.

No, despite what always online Europeans who have never visited will like to tell you. We're just very big and very vocal, so you hear about us all the time. Bad news spread faster then good news. Are you going to be reading news about how good our tap water is, our public restrooms always available, boring stuff like that? Probably not! But that's stuff you'll notice if you do actually visit. We also are much more friendly and welcoming then other countries. We're also tend to be less racist because we vocally talk about our racial problems rather then sweep it under the rug and pretend it doesn't exist. I'm sure I'll get downvoted by some people who don't like to hear that, but they won't be able to refute.

Edit: Why is everything America related online swarmed with Europeans trying to shit on it. It's so exhausting and extremely pretentious. No wonder people have a distorted view of it online.

Not an American here, so please correct me if my take is completely wrong. My understanding is that while the highs are possibly higher than in a lot of places, the lows are also much lower and possibly easier to reach. You could be doing perfectly fine one day, and then you get hit by a hospital bill ruining your life. It's surely a great place to be a billionaire or even just plainly well off. Except far too many people aren't and they would fare much better elsewhere.

Really depends who you are.

America is 50 different countries in one. There are really two whine different Americas. Several of the states are world class nations unto themselves. It’s the 3rd most populous nation in the world and the richest. It invites a lot of immigration to fend off declining birth rates and doesn’t have a cultural taboo about it like Japan.

It lacks a lot of modern supports for its very lowest classes. New immigrants cannot expect to get baseline healthcare, food assistance, or housing. And it has a generous helping of religious nuttery which brings about scattered laws against gays, a generalized attack on women (though nothing like a lot of the developing nations are still stuck in).

That’s the long and short of it. If you want to go into business and have a relatively free hand, it’s still one of the best places to be. If you have nothing and are looking for a compassionate nation that will keep you from dying of poverty, keep looking.

Depends on what you are comparing it to. Overall it is great. There are some serious systemic issues though that I don't really see getting resolved.

It has many things that are bad or disappointing.

Health care is a mess.

It's very car centric outside of maybe New York City.

There's a lot of racism. There are probably still sundown towns. You should go read the new Jim Crow.

The police are dangerous and often useless.

One of the two major political parties doesn't believe in government, and tried to overthrow the government. They're still considered legitimate.

The day to day life in most places is fine though. You almost certainly have power and clean drinking water. With at least one notable exception, on water, but not enough people cared to fix that promptly.

For most people most of the time it's a perfectly fine quality of life. That said, it's a huge country with tons of variation so if you're looking for bad qualities, there are always plenty of examples to point to.

What pisses me off is that we are nowhere near as good as we could be and as we claim to be. There are some very powerful and objectively evil forces in this country.

Its a philanthropists playground. Just dont get caught being poor.

As an American who left, it looks batshit insane to me. Everything is crazy expensive and they're passing restrictive laws that, if passed anywhere in Asia or Africa, would be run as "look at these backwards shitty country" news stories.

I've got a trans kid. We're not returning any time soon. It seems unsafe for them to exist in the us for the foreseeable future.

But I've got us friends who feel the opposite. We visited a friend in Bainbridge a few years ago who really couldn't comprehend why everyone wouldn't want to live on their island.

Asia (here) isn't really any more unsafe. I visited India recently and it felt less safe, but everyone I know there also said it wasn't really. It depends on areas as well, and much of it (everywhere) is just media depictions and racism telling your brain to panic.

The real advantage of the us is just cash. You can make a lot more money there. They're rich. Money is good. It makes life easier. Its also expensive there. To save at any income level, you have to be thrifty.

I moved from America to a developing country, and what pisses me off the most is how the false images of what America is influences countries like this. people here with a little bit of money and very little sense will idealize what they think is the American lifestyle. they want to drive SUVs even though the roads here are narrow and they get stuck constantly and cause traffic jams. they buy weird luxury items they can't afford. they treat people in the blue collar working class like moral inferiors. it's ironic as fuck for a society that is supposedly built on communist values.

When I was a teenager, yes. Visited England and their idea of a "bad neighborhood" confused me, my city at home was rough. Their rough areas were just normal places, not scary at all.

But crime dropped here, like everywhere. It is nicer now, despite the two steps backwards we have taken lately.

We do still have violent people, we do still have a prison-industrial complex, armed police, homeless people and way too many guns, but even here in Florida my trans kid is accepted at school, my older kids got a good education (though the last did not make it out before the attack on education) and most people are nice to each other. Inside the cities it's nice enough, feels modern and city like. Lots of jobs, easy to find a job here.

Health care? Yes, it's shit here compared to a lot of places. If you are rich you can get really good care (and pay a lot for it), if not you just try to stay healthy and hope you don't need anything expensive. Insurance, if you have it, does cover preventative care visits and usually stuff like blood pressure meds or antibiotics are cheap, vaccines too, and birth control usually covered as well. But any actual sickness or bad injury can bankrupt you.

I do think it's a land of opportunity, but the odds are not great, if that makes sense? Certainly one can 'make it' here - think of Bill Clinton becoming president - I don't think that kind of social mobility is everywhere, it's a little less sticky here, more rising and falling going on than most places.

Nothing is ever so black-and-white when it comes to talking about the state of the USA right now. Yes, we are still comparitavely well-off when stacked against developing nations, but we have unique problems that are a real sore spot for many that aren't getting any better and nobody is addressing them, letting the wounds fester.

For example, we have a lot of poverty. Sure, our lowest of the low class probably still enjoy a lifestyle better than that of someone from a remote village in some far away corner of the world, but the promise of prosperity is not equally accessible and the idealized "middle class" is vanishing rapidly. Homelessness is a crisis in basically every large city, especially in the warmer parts of the country, and inflation is still not under control which means the cost of living is going to be unsustainable for a lot of people very soon.

If you put politics aside, things really aren't as bad as they could be, but that doesn't stop people from voicing their concerns that things aren't as good as they could be either.

Some states are better than others. Washington is a better state than Alabama. New York is better than Florida. California is better than Texas. There's a trend here: the states where the ruling party institutes at least European social democracy-lite are the best to live in.

America is a decent place if you put your blinders on and worry about yourself.... and don't get sick. In America, you get sick and you go bankrupt. Some places in the world you get sick and you die. 🤷‍♂️ People in the US are pissed off because the problems we have are obvious, easy to fix, and the people in charge make blatantly shitty decisions because they stand to profit off of them. Unchecked capitalism has corrupted every branch of the government. And since the leaders are the ones that have to regulate it and they profit off of it, they won't change it. The elections are actually lies. And there are people that try to say we are an elite, premier example of democracy and the best country in the world. We are not that. The upper half of this country is broken and it's squeezing the middle and lower class until we pop, for profit.

The decision making people in this country are selfish twats. They would be voted out but gerrymandering and electoral colleges (that they control) prevent the people from actually making the decision. Our elections are a farce.

But if you don't pay attention to those things and you decide to just keep your head down, work, pay rent, consume like they want you too, it's OK. Keep your head out of the news or you just get pissed off and ashamed.

Worker rights kinda suck and it can be difficult to form communities due to being more spread out and car centric.

It's not, but people love to be outraged and will find any reason to be. We have extremely comprehensive media coverage, so anything that can possibly go wrong will definitely be covered in the media, whereas in other countries, you just don't hear about most bad things happening. The media will always twist anything and everything to be as polarizing as possible, as that generates clicks/views. Most of the time when you see things on the internet that make you rage (including here on lemmy), if you look into it deeper, there quite a bit of nuance, and you can see where they were coming from when they did such a thing. But to many people who are perpetually online, they don't care about nuance. Everything is black and white to many people on the internet. Either it makes you happy or it makes you rage, and there is no in-between.

Things that actually do suck:

The mass shootings are absolutely awful and should be taken more seriously.

Healthcare is expensive if you don't have insurance. But most people have decent enough insurance that it isn't a huge deal. For example, my insurance plan has a $2000 out of pocket maximum, so no matter what happens, the most I can ever pay per year is $2000 for my entire family. Plus, most people rarely see a doctor, so it isn't something that affects their daily lives. Kind of an "out of mind" type of thing.

It depends on who you are, really.

If you're a poor, black woman living in Louisiana where the only work you can find is at a chemical plant, your life is going to fucking suck.

If you're upper-middle class living in a city, you're probably going to have a pretty good life.

There are some systems that are just awful by developed standards though. Education, medicine, policing, and politics come to mind. They're not likely to change, so you just have to cope with them. Basically just don't ever get sick or interact with the police. You'll probably die if you do either.

I come from a developing nation and we were always told how America is great and whatnot.

It's called soft power. Hollywood and US military and fiscal aid makes it seem that the US is friendly to your country and a prosperous land of freedom, when it's anything but.

Soft power is also why people think of Korea and Japan as more favourable and less conservative than countries with similar views on women, LGBT rights , etc that do not have the same level of soft power due to cultural and technological exports .

The areas of the country that are in terrible poverty, with serious systemic issues, vote for the people who refuse to help them. They're so proud of it, and being American, and own the most guns. They hate you for not being one of them. It's a weird place to visit in all these areas.

If you live in a major metropolitan area, it's fine. The country could have a much higher standard of living if we'd band together and get some labor rights and benefits codified. As a worker your treated better, and have more rights in every other western country.