When I was 14 years old, my dad’s company offered him a position in Tokyo, so we picked up and moved halfway across the world. I’ve always considered myself very lucky that I got to live outside the United States for three years and be a third-culture kid.
For those three years we were essentially cut off from anything happening back home. This was before the Web or e-mail, and long-distance phone calls were expensive. The two available English-language newspapers covered some American politics and foreign policy, but they were mostly internationally focused. I could go to the American Club every week to read a week-old Sunday New York Times, and during our last year and a half we had CNN, but that was about it. I basically have an American pop-culture void from 1988 to 1991. We landed at JFK in the summer of 1989 for a visit, and everyone was wearing Batman t-shirts. The following summer it was Bart Simpson t-shirts. It was overwhelmingly strange.
Living overseas gave me a perspective on this country that most Americans will never get to have: the perspective of an outsider. The perspective of a foreigner. Although I’ve been back here for almost 20 years, I have always carried some of that perspective with me. I’m forever thankful for it.
Yesterday I read this piece [via Matt Haughey], and it’s been resonating with me ever since.
It begins:
Americans, I have some bad news for you:
You have the worst quality of life in the developed world—by a wide margin.
It’s a pretty entertaining piece of writing, although some it is over the top. That said, it makes an excellent point near the beginning: most of what the American people accept as normal is not really normal. The frame through which Americans see things is distorted. There is so much that we accept in this country that people in the rest of developed world would never stand for.
First and foremost, our sub-par health care system.
Consider this: you are the only people in the developed world without a single-payer health system. Everyone in Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand has a single-payer system. If they get sick, they can devote all their energies to getting well. If you get sick, you have to battle two things at once: your illness and the fear of financial ruin.
Our system is an outrage. And yet everyone thinks it’s normal.
We were living in Japan when Hirohito, the Emperor of Japan, died. At the time, I imagined a Kansas farmwife back in the U.S. saying to her husband, “I saw on the teevee that the king a’ China died!” Now, I’m sure most middle-aged Americans in 1989 remembered World War II and knew who Hirohito was. But the point is, most Americans don’t care or know about anything that happens outside the United States unless it involves someone attacking us.
Even though other countries have problems, ours are worse. Things here are just fucked up. Life here is seriously out of whack.
Our health care system sucks. Our taxes are too low. Our infrastructure is a shambles. I ride NJ Transit twice a week and those train cars are straight out of the 1970s, and they’re never on time, and a heavy rainstorm can shut things down. In most other developed countries, this would be unacceptable, but here we all accept it as normal. None of this is normal. Thomas Friedman and Nick Kristof are dead on.
It’s the Southernification of the United States. Before the Civil War, the north was innovating, building its infrastructure. The south wanted to remain a stratified, backwoods society. We should have let the South go like they wanted, because the Old South mentality controls the whole country today. It’s ridiculous.
It’s the Overton Window again. Our frame is completely distorted.
People need to stop feeling guilty for wanting health care and higher taxes and a good infrastructure. It is normal to want these things!
And in the rest of the developed world, it is normal to have them.
Americans need to wake the hell up.