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I've been lurking since this was the SlateStarCodex subreddit, but this post finally pulled me out of the cave.
I am a native-born American, and can honestly say I haven't gone more than a month in my adult life without being wildly, joyously grateful for it. Everything you said it true, its wonderful here. I've driven across the continent twice, lived on both coasts and the Great Plains, and visited much of the rest. There's enormous variety in culture and geography (well, maybe not compared to India) and whatever you're looking for, we've got it somewhere. My wife has lived abroad in Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia and shares my feelings: this is the greatest country on Earth. If you can live here, you'd be crazy to live anywhere else. I enjoy our visits to Europe, I love our European friends, but when I'm there I'm reminded how much I love my home.
It's not so much that we're rich (though that is pretty great!). For me, it's a more intangible sense of freedom and possibility. You can do things here. You really can build yourself up from nothing. It's not propaganda, I know people who have done it. A former colleague grew up in a mountain village in the Himalayas, studied in the US, got a PhD, post-doc-ed at Harvard, founded a company, it went under, and worked his way into managing a major government R&D program. A college buddy grew up on in an isolated island fishing village in Alaska. Last I saw him he was rising star in a BigLaw firm. This all might sound naive to many, but I'm middle aged with a family and mortgage and have seen my share of troubles and dashed dreams: I'm no naif. I spent 15 years starting from age 12 working towards what I thought was a dream career and I failed. But all it took to pivot to something new (and better!) was some hustle in getting my resume into the right hands. A friend in France has spent the last several years trying to change careers, between less demanding and (in the US) less credentialed fields than mine, and keeps getting stalled out and delayed by bureaucratic requirements and credentialism. The freedom to try, to fail, and to try again, in a country wealthy enough to give you a reasonable chance of success, and a decent living if you fail, is invigorating once you've taken advantage of it. I now make a comfortable living doing work I enjoy. If I lived somewhere else I'd probably ride that out through retirement. But this is America, and I think I can do better. My wife and I are going to found a company, and try to build something great from the ground up. And if we fail, we'll still be all right!
I'm not going to pretend there isn't a lot of ugly here, but you should know that part of our culture is we put our flaws on full display. Broadly speaking, we don't hide our problems, we shout them from the rooftops. There's typically some truth (though much exaggerated) to the complaints. But I find that most criticism of America is either comparing the United States to its own ideals and blaming it for falling short, or comparing the United States to an idealized image of some other country or compilation of countries. In the case of the latter, I don't find the worst of America losing to the best of other countries terribly compelling. As to the former: guilty as charged. We do not live up to our ideals. But the ugly condemnations of our nation and each other you see blaring across the internet are the public face of the continuous struggle of the United States to better define and implement our founding principles. How can we improve without frank argument about our problems? America is not a finished product: we are always lurching towards a more perfect union.
There's a great metaphor for the difference between the United States as presented on the internet and the real thing. Doubtless you've seen the meme images of the American highway surrounded by fast foods restaurants and gas stations beneath a forest of garish corporate signage, usually accompanied by condemnatory text. This is Breezewood, Pennsylvania. Had the photographer turned ninety degrees to the left or right, that photograph would have been of the beautifully forested Appalachian foothills. The photographer chose to record the one ugly spot in acres of sylvan beauty, and that's all anyone sees.
Not that you can tell from this snapshot, but I have a pronounced cynical streak. I see the same challenges, the same seeds of eventual disaster that other commenters have highlighted. But every society, throughout history, has always been but a generation from failure, has always carried within itself the seeds of its own collapse. Nothing is fated - we can overcome these challenges, and the arguments are so heated because we have so much to fight for.
In many circles in the US there's a saying: "There are Americans born all over the world, some just need to make it home." I hope you make it, because we're just getting started.
Thank you. At this point so many kind souls like yourself have endorsed my arrival in the States that I'm tempted to muster all of you up and march on the State Department haha.
I'm not writing a longer reply only because I fully endorse everything you've said, and it means a lot to me!
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