Been seeing a lot about how the government passes shitty laws, lot of mass shootings and expensive asf health care. I come from a developing nation and we were always told how America is great and whatnot. Are all states is America bad ?
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 agree with you. I'll also add that if you are a poor Black woman in California, New York, Massachusetts, and a number of other states you will may have access to great public schools, where you can be guided into (public or private) college and grad school and programs for certification where you can actually claw your way into the Middle Class. It really depends on where you grow up in the US.
I’m over fifty now and have never been even close to a mass shooting. Outside of a gun range I’ve never heard a gun shot. I’m definitely not middle class or upper middle class and other then a 2 year stretch I’ve never had a problem getting insurance or getting insurance to pay my medical bills.
In the last year my mom has started having a problem with certain medical bills getting paid by insurance. They always pay but sometimes it requires a call or two to the insurance or doctors office to fix it.
It’s amazingly easy to start your own business in the US. The number of opportunities is crazy. That goes for both people who just came to the US and for those that were born here.
In the last year my mom has started having a problem with certain medical bills getting paid by insurance. They always pay but sometimes it requires a call or two to the insurance or doctors office to fix it.
I would like to provide an anecdotal counter-point, because I don’t think your experience is representative.
My father was a master plumber and operated his own business, very successfully, for 30+ years until he died of lymphoma. We fought with insurance tooth and nail but when all was said and done, his estate - which included property, savings, and his business assets - were drained to less than $10,000 by medical bills when all was said and done.
He was a military veteran, and was also getting support from the VA - if not for that, he’d have been bankrupted years before he died.
This was someone who, by most metrics, did everything right - he pulled himself up by his bootstraps, was an absolute workaholic, and worked hard to make his business successful, and for all of that, he checked out with less than $10,000. And he died at 64 - he was working up until about 2 weeks before he died.
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.
I’ll jump in and clarify a point as an American, the states vary greatly and the healthcare issue, while undeniably more expensive, general doesn’t leave you destitute if you’re in a blue state. California pushes for universal coverage and if you’re poor enough (which isn’t actual that poor) you can get insurance pretty cheaply, covering those crazy bills. Plus emergency rooms here can be paid by state under some circumstances.
For instance, my wife’s labor and subsequent baby hospitalization for jaundice cost us 200 for two trips and several nights stay, but the bill was 30k. Emplorers of a certain size (iirc 15 full time) are also compelled by law to cover insurance.
There’s also some safety net for free food, unemployment payments, welfare, and even transportation subsidies, although even good government here is like playing hard mode in a sim, so it’s not always as effective as a country like Finland. Some people simply don’t get aid and end up homeless, etc. Still miles above an underdeveloped country though.
As an overall answer: humans are incredibly adaptable, so as a person living in the US, it almost never subjectively feels bad. For goodness' sake, I knew people who lived in Chicago's Hyde Park (one of the most dangerous neighborhoods) and happily biked to work. I personally lived in what people would describe as a "hood" and a "third-world country" for a good year and a half, and honestly felt really safe over there. Because of this, I honestly don't think anyone can give an objective answer solely from their living experiences.
Objectively, the US is a developed country and is not terrible, but regarding your specific points:
Yes, the government passed shitty laws, and chose to not pass a lot of not-shitty laws.
Yes, there are more mass shootings than the country should have. I'm not going to say why.
Insured healthcare isn't expensive (correction: some stuff are still too expensive even after insurance). However, uninsured healthcare is incredibly expensive, and unfortunately people without employment/self-employed have to purchase their own insurance... which is also stupidly expensive. Also, a lot of things that should be insured aren't.
The different states are certainly different. US politics is very polarized, so heavy-blue and heavy-red states are quite different in their approaches to... many things in life. Whether they are good or bad is up to you.
I mean, people living in Switzerland complain about their countries all the time, even though almost everyone else in the world envy the way they live... so it is possible that some might be a bit overblown.
Yes it is. I have "good" insurance and it still cost me $3,000 for a few stitches, a CAT scan, and a night in the hospital when I slipped and hit my head. That's on top of the almost $600 a month I'm paying, and the $1200 a month my employer is paying.
Calling Hyde Park one of Chicago’s most dangerous neighborhoods makes this comment impossible to take seriously.
For reference, Hyde Park is the neighborhood where President Obama taught law and got his famous haircut. His home was a few blocks outside the neighborhood in Kenwood, one of the richest neighborhoods in the city; also the location of Louis Farrakhan’s mansions and former mayor Rahm Emmanuel’s house.
You might have already figured this out from the law school thing, but Hyde Park is home to, and dominated by, the University of Chicago, one of the best schools in the world. It’s got buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright and other famous architects. It’s pumped to the gills with historic wealth and private security.
Muggings are a problem. Gang violence is not. Get real.
I don't think my parents or grandparents had to "grind" for the American Dream™. They could afford a house, a car, and raise a family all on one full-time job 50 years ago.
A lot of people don’t see what their parents had to deal with, because by the time we are old enough to notice those things, they have already had a chance to work their way upward. Not to say that certain things might not have been easier back then, because in some ways it certainly was. But I hear about how my grandparents worked in a factory or joined the military because it was their only option at the time, and then I hear about how my great grandmother had 8 children to take care of as a single parent, and she walked miles to get to work in her factory job. Things have always been difficult depending on circumstances.
Unfortunately there are a lot of people here (and all over the world) who grind their asses off through multiple jobs while sacrificing their entire life, and still don't earn enough to lead a decent life or own anything.
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.
That’s because American health insurance is not really insurance it’s a discount plan. Any of you remember being forced to sell those overpriced coupon books as fundraisers in school? That’s what American health insurance is. It’s a shitty discount plan/coupon book that you are forced into buying from your employer and the plan itself makes sure you pay as much out of pocket as they can legally get away with.
At least the coupon book is for products with real prices. Healthcare is a total scam with prices based on who is paying. The entire system is corrupt from top to bottom. The US problem is extreme systemic corruption. It is not individual corruption outside of the billionaire supreme court judges level, it is corporate sponsored corruption on a much larger scale.
The USA has a tenth of the laws and protections of any other western country. We have had nearly 50 years of a political denial of service attack from a right wing campaign of misdirection and distraction politics. No one can institute reasonable laws and protections when they are constantly battling whatever stupid inflammatory nonsense that hits the congressional floor. This is why the nonsense keeps happening. It is because it controls the conversation. The only purpose is to keep as many loopholes as possible open for the parasitic worthless billionaires that are funding it. The only fix is to force out the billionaires. The only way to accrue billions of dollars is by exploitation and criminal activity. There are no exceptions to this rule. Every billionaire is a criminal evading prosecution.
If you’re in a developing nation, consider this: America has probably about the same amount of wealth inequality as you, but America has probably ten or a hundred times more wealth. So, the American who lives a life similar to you will have more money when he travels; but while he’s in America, there’s some rich, corrupt villain in the nearby big city who has enough money to buy up and destroy his neighborhood at any time, who owns most of the police force and government and media - I am presuming your developing nation is the same way, because only some parts of the EU are different (at least from what I’ve been told)
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 .
In 2015 I was in Niger doing NGO work and the founder of the NGO said to me that the most important thing about America is the peaceful transition of power. That next year that transition of power came under direct attack and then again in 2020.
From my travels and the people I talk to, we have been under attack since at least 2008. From domestic terrorists working with foreign governments. Factions in spy agencies actively engaged in domestic espionage to help elites take more power. Cultist religious mega churches spreading misinformation and conspiracies in rural areas for decades priming for a “revolution”.
Billionaires that you hear about daily are also in on it.
You better fight for your democracy by showing up to every town meeting you can America because you will absolutely lose everything. Support unions and delete that extreme individualism in your programming that capitalist America wants to instill in each person so you never organize against them.
This is the time to get out in front of 2024 and fight for your rights and a reasonable society not this psycho bullshit we are stuck in right now.
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.
A lot of the ones that make it out to be greater than it is are just wishfully thinking. They imagine a place where they don’t need to make any changes while everything else must conform to their ideals and bend for them. They imagine trump is the answer to this. They typically have the simplest of beliefs and solutions that would fail even the slightest scrutiny.
The US is also extremely huge geographically. Towns are different from each other, and states and just general locations can be different from each other. There is no one place you can say “is America”. Hell, you can have a peaceful family friendly neighborhood, and the next street over could be a drugs and violence.
I agree the media absolutely makes it seem worse than it is. Especially with all the 24/7 news and fear mongering to grab attention.
I have very mixed feelings about Trump. Obviously, he really isn’t good for any country, so I hope he doesn’t get re-elected. Just throw him in the jail already. Unfortunately, I can’t deny the fact that on some sick and twisted schadenfreude way I also enjoyed watching the first four seasons of the Shitshow. Oh, what a rollercoaster that was.
Add comment