Be thankful for the USA

In the last six years I’ve worked with many people from all over the world, and I’ve learned quite a bit about the United States from talking to them. We have a lot to be thankful for here, so much that we take for granted, such as:

Beautiful big trucks. A woman from Morocco admired the clean, beautifully painted 18-wheelers, and the smaller trucks too, which are so much better than the dilapidated old trucks of her country, which she said were all dirty white.

Discount shopping. In some places, such as Venezuela, good quality clothes and other goods don’t go on sale.

Volunteerism. A Brazilian woman told me people think of Brazilians as warm and friendly, but in fact they have little community spirit. If she would admonish a friend not to litter, the friend might say she’d have her maid pick up the trash. There are few volunteer clubs of the sort that have always been part of American life, the women’s clubs, the religious and business groups, that help themselves and help others. Volunteerism and charity are huge in the United States, not so much elsewhere.

Safety. People in Mexico City and Caracas are subject to carjackings every time they drive through town. Women don’t like to wear even their wedding rings in Mexico City because of robbery. And they can’t report such crimes to the police, because the police are underpaid, corrupt, and unprofessional, and can’t or won’t do anything. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez has even encouraged stealing by the poor. One Mexican woman who was pulled over for speeding followed the procedures she’d been taught, keep your hands on the steering wheel, be polite, etc., and the policeman let her off with a warning. “The system works!” she said. Mostly it does. And the roads here are in pretty good condition too!

Access to information. The average Chinese citizen doesn’t know much if anything about subjects like the Tiannamen Square massacre, the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners, or Tibet, and would be at risk if he carried books or tapes back home. One man speculated that he might be able to get away with carrying a tiny disk for a thumb drive through customs when he returned to China.

Freedom to have a family:  freedom to live. People here are so avid to protect their legal ability to abort that they don’t value their freedom to have children. Chinese are allowed to have only one child, but have a few ways to get around that law: having a second child away from their home city, because the paperwork isn’t transferred; paying a fee or fine; having second and third children in another country, who may then be taken back to China.

Real life. A Frenchman who’d lived in the deep South for a few months was shocked by a kind of poverty he wasn’t used to, rural poverty, which is not like the poverty of the Parisian slums. He’d run across an old man who lived in a trailer and went hunting for food, both of which he found disturbing. I explained to him the ancient tradition of hunting among farmers and country people (and reminded him where meat comes from). If the man was able to hunt his own food, that meant he was healthy enough to be active, he was independent, and he had food. It’s a good way of life. As for his trailer, it might have been as big and as well equipped as a city apartment in any slum. Or not. The urban poor in the U.S. usually have adequate shelter, clothing, food, and electronic devices and don’t register visually as “poor” because they really aren’t by most standards. But they’re not self-sufficient. That’s a different kind of poverty. The young, hip Frenchman thought everybody should be “the same,” meaning they should all have the same amount of money, according to the classic European socialist ideal (not the reality). That rules out almost all self-sufficiency, independence, creativity, entrepreneurship, and of course, genuine “diversity.” He meant also that he’d feel better if everyone had the same lifestyle and tastes as any young middlish-class Westerner raised on TV, movies, and popular music. Which means this taste of reality, getting close to the ground, not by hiking and camping on vacation but by earning your dinner from the earth, was too real. In the United States, that kind of reality still exists.

Be thankful.