More to be thankful for in the USA, based on stories people have told me about their experiences here:
A German woman's car battery died while she was grocery shopping with her infant and small child. Another woman noticed her plight in the parking lot and offered to drive her home, but after the German woman piled her groceries, kids, and all into the woman's car, another woman offered to jump her battery. So off she went in her own car, but on the way home, the battery died again on a busy road. A policeman told her to pull over or get the car towed. Then a worker came over from a construction site by the road and offered to call the Auto Club, using his own card, and get her car towed home. When she got home at last, she realized she'd left her purse in the first woman's car. She thought that was the last she'd see of it, but the woman called her and said she had it. My German friend said she'd pick it up when her husband came home, but the woman insisted on bringing it to her house (and of course everything in the purse was intact). The German woman was stunned by the help she'd been given by several strangers. She said this would probably not have happened in Germany, which stunned me. Not everybody helps strangers, but out of a crowd, there will always be some who will help out a woman with small children, or indeed anyone in a jam like that.
While discussing traffic rules with a man from Venezuela, and reading the rules book for the driver's license test, we talked about approaching a one-lane bridge. There's one nearby marked with stop signs at each end, and I told him that everyone slows down and the first to reach the bridge has the right of way. He asked in some amazement if people really did that, did they really stop and wait for the other person to cross the bridge. Not everyone follows traffic rules, but mostly we do. It's civil, it's easier, and it's safer. We've all heard jokes about the driving in some Latin countries but there must be a lot of truth to it, since he was surprised at the orderly system of traffic right-of-way that most people observe.
A Danish woman living here bought a US flag for her small children to hang in their room. She'd been struck by the fact that Americans often display American flags. The Danes don't buy Danish flags. She understood that this represents a love of country that they don't have, at least not in the same way. Everyone I've met here from abroad loves their country, but they don't have the sense of pride in a national ideal that we have. It doesn't matter that we haven't always lived up to the ideal. That is not humanly possible. But the United States was founded on a statement of principles, not on the happenstance of one ethnic group who lived in the same place for a long time and shared a long history, as valuable as that is too.
The culture we've developed here is imperfect, but it has a lot of good features that apparently are not general facts of life all over the world. For which, let us be thankful.
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