What are you majoring in, if I can be so bold?
Political Science. I switched to that because my interests lie there and I was tired of Communications.
I should have taken a hard science, but I do the technical side of the communications equation for the Air Force and I thought that I would round that out. I’m done with my minor in that subject and I had no desire to finish it so I changed to Poli-Sci since I was so deep into school and didn’t want to add any more time to my sentence.
Every day I kick myself that I didn’t go to Vo-Tech and learn how to work on cars or something like that, but now I’m far enough down the road that I’ve gone too far to turn back.
A lot of the posters here have given excellent answers. I think the basic facts of the professor’s answers are true, but not for the reasons that he believes.
“such as more poverty”
There is no other country in the world that deals with the diversity of races, the history of slavery a segregation, a southern border with poor people coming in by the thousand, and a history of freedom and individuality which is not conducive to a strong central government solution to the problem. Agree or disagree, but there it is.
“worse health care”
I have health insurance, and that gives me the best care of any person in the world. The problem is that we have so many uninsured. It’s bad that we have such a depedence on insurance, but the above about the distrust of a central government solution lets it happen.
“more violence”
I think this goes back to the fact that we have several races that hate each other and a thriving drug trade with gangbangers and addicts killing for money. The average Joe is VERY safe, probably more so than in any other country, but the few very violent people skew the numbers.
" more pollution"
When you are #1, and have the most stuff, you will have the most pollution. This one is a no brainer.
“, worse education”
Again, skewed by the racial divides and the poverty. I hear about how “bad” on average that South Florida schools are. My daughter goes to an excellent public school as do most people on this side (middle class) of town. But when you combine her school with the inner city school where only 13 percent (yes 13) read at grade level, it brings the whole system down. These are not issues that England and France, for example, have to deal with.
We have a more substantial right to privacy, generally. That has been gradually eroding throughout the decade, but there still aren’t cameras everywhere like I hear is the case in England, there aren’t metal detectors at shopping malls and clubs like in Israel (and probably much of Western Europe too), and if you leave your backpack somewhere it probably won’t be burnt to a crisp or blown up when you get back to it.
England, France and Spain are all racially diverse nations, and England (at least) has officially enacted/supported slavery or at least institutionalized racism in the colonies, like Jamaica. Poor people flow into England and France from the south in large numbers, too. France has a history of freedom and individuality about as long as ours, considering that its Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was drafted just 13 years after our Declaration of Independence, and its Constitution came shortly thereafter.
We have more pollution per person, too. China and India both have larger populations and booming economies but not as much pollution overall.
England and France have large immigrant populations too, and France in particular has even more discordant race relations than we do.
I would be interested to learn more about the racial situation in these countries. I’m sure there are a few minorities there, but they, or their parents haven’t went through something akin to Jim Crow.
They certainly aren’t relegated to ghettos and denied opportunities in some places still to this day. As a conseqence, these minorities haven’t got a “Fuck the World” attitude, which continues to make things worse, etc.
I think in education one is often called upon to argue a case for something one does not necessarily agree with. I recall in High School having to defend Creationism – not because I agreed with it, but because I was assigned it. Defending things you don’t necessarily agree with is a good learning tool; both from a knowledge perspective and for general argument construction skills. Also, knowing the arguments against your point of view completes ones knowledge on a subject.
You don’t know much about marginalized Muslims in France then. The U.S. made a huge mistake in the 60’s and 70’s by housing blacks in centralized housing projects. Some of them were even super-concentrated like the high-rise housing projects in Chicago and other urban areas (like the TV show Good Times). The resulting crime and societal breakdown within those projects seems perfectly obvious now but they couldn’t see it at the time. That was a horrible mistake and the U.S. has abandoned that model now and has moved to more diffuse and integrated housing for poor minorities.
France OTOH has yet to learn that lesson. They basically warehouse poor Muslims away from the city center and generous living allowances make it possible for them to stay almost completely unassimilated for generations. Like with impoverished American blacks, young male Muslims don’t have anything to do but wreak havoc all day, every day. There have been several instances of mass rioting over the past few years and the last statistics I saw said that even on a non-riot night, 100 cars on average were set on fire by young Muslim males. Car fires are the tip of the iceberg but they are a visible symbol. There are only a few housing projects in the U.S. that have such visible unrest at any given time. The French still don’t have a plan to deal with this situation so it just smolders (literally).
So the US sucks because of black people? Am I just being sensitive, or is that what some people are saying in this thread?
I think this thread has veered pretty far off course, so I’ll go ahead and close it.