Against my better judgment, I’m going to make a statement that sounds incredibly crass, but is directionally true: those are all travesties that no decent society should accept, but at the end of the day, they’re rounding errors.
There’s plenty that’s wrong with America, but there’s no other country within the same order of magnitude of scale (or, hell, expand that to either a population of 50+ million or an order of magnitude greater, even) that has long term prospects as promising as the United States.
China’s on the verge of demographic collapse. Europe, as much as I love to visit and would probably enjoy living there, is more or less the definition of sclerotic. Every other country that excels at both human and economic development is too small to move the needle. Yet the United States remains, overall, a pretty darn good place to live and a magnet for talent and capital all over the world (to say nothing of its own beyond-bountiful resources).
Edit: the formatting on this is just atrocious, and I don’t have time to do more than take a quick shot at hopefully fixing it, but suspect it isn’t gonna work. Apologies in advance.
Just off the top of my head, I guess my short list would look something like this. I grant some, maybe all, of these have drawbacks, but these are the factors that I personally value and what I would miss by moving to any of the other places I’ve visited or of which I’m aware that seem like delightful places to live.
1. The sheer number of incredibly unique large cities (and the correlating lack of a single city that dominates national culture)
2. The ethos of individualism
3. The national park system
4. The sheer amount of diversity (racial, ethnic, national origin, religious, regional, etc.)
5. My personal access to, and quality of, healthcare (I grant that this is highly, highly subjective)
6. Other Americans (believe it or not lol)
7. Higher educational system
8. Economic dynamism and opportunity
9. Our foundational documents and subsequent amendments/improvements thereto
10. Our national tendency to do the right thing (after, of course, exhausting all other courses of action)
11. Approximately 10 trillion different regional cuisines (have you seen the number of strongly held opinions about different ways to smoke and serve meat?)
12. Every type of natural beauty imaginable
Not saying we have a monopoly on any of these! But I like where I live and think it’s a pretty cool place.
There’s plenty that’s wrong with America, but there’s no other country within the same order of magnitude of scale (or, hell, expand that to either a population of 50+ million or an order of magnitude greater, even) that has long term prospects as promising as the United States.
China’s on the verge of demographic collapse. Europe, as much as I love to visit and would probably enjoy living there, is more or less the definition of sclerotic. Every other country that excels at both human and economic development is too small to move the needle. Yet the United States remains, overall, a pretty darn good place to live and a magnet for talent and capital all over the world (to say nothing of its own beyond-bountiful resources).