Ultra-Conservative

[Clevernick]

I've just started working in the UK, and it's the fifth country I've lived and worked in. The previous ones were Canada, the USA, Sweden, and Italy. I've spent no less than three years working and paying taxes in each one.

So I've seen the S-word in action. I've seen left-vs-right politics, rhetoric severely different from reality, blind spots, and the results of gun control, s-c-lized medicine, propaganda, and xenophobia on different cultures.

The most striking universal is that most people, like you posters above, prefer their own country. They will find any and all justifications as to why, though they'll often have very distorted information (or none at all) about other countries. So that's just human. And it's fine.

There's nothing wrong with it, but watching people argue that their own country is the best because of whatever information their own culture feeds them is very much like listening to religious people argue why their faith is not only true, it's logical.

My view at this moment is that the USA was, as recently as 1979 or so, all that. It was free in every sense, politically aware, highly educated, dynamically inventive, morally lofty, and the best country to get rich in, get sick in, have children in, or protest political injustice in.

These things are no longer true, but there's practically an entire industry of spin doctors now devoted to convincing its citizens that they still are true, and that anyone from outside who says otherwise has an agenda.

(I don't.)

And this makes me sad, since I admire that country for what it was.

At the moment, I'd much rather get sick in Sweden, get rich in Canada, get educated in England, learn politics in Italy. No country I've seen is best or worst, but the US is the only one right now that has such a large gap between its self-image and its current reality.

As a simple example, check out these privacy ratings for the land of the free:

http://www.privacyinternational.org/...5telegraph.jpg

Yes, you can point out that the UK rates even worse than the US. But the British realize this. (In fact this diagram is from a british newspaper.) The Americans will see this chart and see it as an attack, try to discredit me or its source. Anything but accept the assessment and work to correct it.

When the American people have the insight and courage to see their country accurately, this may be remedied. But right now, anyone who does is labelled "hates America". That's kind of sad. I hope it improves.