Americans are, for the most part, a kindly and trusting people, happy to help out complete strangers.
America is a shit show run by sociopaths.
It is important to disambiguate these two things.
That makes it all the easier for rich vultures to pit Americans against one another - to the tune of it being the subject of a very valid joke:
> A banker, a worker, and an immigrant are sitting at a table with 20 cookies. The banker takes 19 cookies and warns the worker: "Watch out, the immigrant is going to take your cookie away."
As a European, I can assure you we share these traits. Try asking one how they feel about local Romani, African or Syrian refugees, foreign beggars, etc.
https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_...
source: Pew research reports and other
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_safety_net
Also, while a large part of the religious donations go to the operation of the church, churches do a lot of other charitable activities such as food pantries, shelters, disaster relief, education, etc.
Having lived in both places, charity is simply much more of a part of the culture in the U.S. I think the general feeling in Germany was that taking care of people in trouble was the job of the government and that they paid their taxes and that doing more was not necessary.
Social problems often make more sense to attack at a governmental level.
When you have a patchwork of different charitable initiatives, often regionally bounded, they can easily fall victim to tunnel vision. You end up with solutions like "we solved the poor care metrics in Facility A by shipping the worst cases to Facility B" and then nobody's checking if Facility B is actually worse.
Individual charity also tends to have the problem of awkward consumer choices. well-marketed and mediagenic causes out-raise less appetizing ones that might produce more impact for the same investment. Getting this information into the hands of a few professional analysts and budgeters may be easier than trying to run a broad PR campaign.
Europeans freak out at levels of immigration that are normal in the US.
At least it is better than Europe which spent the first few decades of the 1900s exterminating them by the millions.
Even now, Europe won’t allow foreigners to assimilate. Name any major EU company led by a non-white person. Even today at football games all over Europe, non-white players are openly subjected to horrific racial abuse by the crowds.
Europe is still horribly racist towards any outsiders. Yet, living in their ethnically homogeneous countries they cast stones at the USA which has actually assimilated and welcomed people from all over the world.
* Rishi Sunak is literally our Prime Minister.
* Sadiq Khan is the Mayor of London.
* Wael Sawan, the CEO of Shell, the biggest UK company, is Lebanese.
* C. S. Venkatakrishnan is the CEO of Barclays, HQ'd in London and one of the worlds biggest banks.
* Johnny Boufarhat is the founder of Hopin, an online meetings platform that exploded during COVID. While it's in some trouble now and I'm not a fan, Johnny's parents are Lebanese and Syrian, although he's from Australia.
Seriously dude, this stuff isn't hard to find. What kind of warped vision do you have of Europe here?
As a brown guy, I have definetly faced much more microaggressions and "do you belong here" type conversations in the UK than I ever have growing up and working in the US.
Your comment is the equivalent of saying "Obama was president, blacks don't face racism anymore".
> Name any major EU company led by a non-white person
(although the UK is no longer in the EU)
I meant nothing else other than answering that line.
If anything, take it up with parent comment, someone who believes non-white people are incapable of running large companies in Europe.
Shell (nominally UK but founded and well known as Royal Dutch Shell) is the largest EU(ish) company, headed by Lebanese-Canadian Wael Sawan.
Exor (Italy/Netherlands) is #10, headed by Indian Ajaypal Singh Banga.
Please, check your facts before making prejudicial claims again. And don't try "No True Scotsman" because it would just be too funny in this context.
Wut? Europe is anything but ethnically homogenous.
The US is anything but welcoming now. It might have been in the past.
You are right. I forgot how diverse countries like Belgium are where Flemish, French, and German communities (whose ancestors all likely were born within a few hundred miles of each other) all live together in peace and harmony (other than when they try to form a government)
We mildly dislike all the other nationalities (except the French, everyone hates the French), but we have a few thousand years of history fighting each other and it just doesn’t seem worth the effort any more.
All of that falls to nothing compared to the dislike some people have for the European version of the Mexicans stealing our jobs (hence, far right populism in Europe rising sharply right now)
Never mind that none of the ethic Europeans wants to do those jobs in the first place. I’m sure we’ll figure it out in 100 years or so. When everyone will be some variety of brown/yellow/pink.
We like to say shit on social media and occasionally throw a tiny minority of our money and none of our time at the most visible problems resulting in parasites specializing in appearing to do useful things while mostly paying people with degrees to think about helping people.
This is why we have people dying for lack of medicine, starving kids, and stories of that random teacher whose humiliation made the rounds on social media who people raised 80k for that one time in place of systemic solutions.
America is run by the kind of folks the disreputable folks discussed above would vote for.