I asked him why he moved here, and he said "America is where you get rich". I often meditate on whether he made a Faustian bargain or not.
I spend a lot of time trying to understand the country I was born in. What's the right approach to this place? Is this a community or a marketplace? Newt Gingrich says marketplace, and that seems to be the opinion of the owners in this country.
Is this place so far gone that a reasonable man will try to extract as many resources and expatriate his money and his family to Norther Europe?
Hunter S. Thompson called America a Kingdom of Fear and then shot himself. Al Giordano tried to help through activism but concluded this country is psychopathic and moved to S. America.
N. Europe beats the US on almost every quality of life metric. The towns, cities and trains in Europe I see on travel shows just look prettier than the sprawling pattern of chain restaurants and gas stations I see here. Sprawl bothers me on a very base and fundamental level.
I overpay for crappy broadband and healthcare and my neighbors are irrationally afraid and half our tax dollars fund a bloated war machine. For the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world, things kind of suck here.
I've moved to some of the best cities this country has to offer and I found them lacking. In Austin and Boulder my girlfriend would be repeatedly harassed by schizophrenics let loose on the streets.
I spent an hour conversing with a mentally unstable tattooed skin head in Austin armed with a claw hammer for protection from other homeless. If he is to be believed, and he seemed sincere, the police bound and gagged him to a chair and beat him for an hour while denying him his anti psychotics.
The homeless in Austin know not to ask for much. In Boulder a street kid with dreads will sneer if you give him any less than a $5. The wretched of Austin just ask for quarters. They feel lucky that they aren't scheduled for lethal injection on felony murder charges.
I was in Austin when the state executed a homeless kid that not even the prosecutor thought killed anyone. Four homeless kids take LSD. One snaps and kills two others. Texas executes the one kid that didn't hurt anyone on felony muder charges. The actual murderer was given a life sentence because he took a plea.
The only silver lining I can take from all this is that because things suck and the US is a huge unified market, it is a great country to innovate and solve people's problems with technology.
I used to spend a lot of thought time getting political or philosophical about my complaints above, I have come to realize if we are to be saved, our salvation will only come through technological innovation.
One of my questions is have things changed? Has the rest of the world improved and the US declined in the last thirty years?
You are right, I will have to go and find out for myself.
Optimism, and a few radical theories about the possibilities of genetic engineering.
Being a Dane myself I can't help smiling when seeing the parent story. I've got a 15 month old daughter, and throughout her entire life she's slept outside for daytime naps. Besides the random playing kid making too much noise, it's been completely uneventful. As a bonus, it means that you've got 1-2 hours of lovely silence indoors before hell breaks loose again...