I’m not sure how you get the impression that this is rare? Plenty of countries have democratic elections.
Sure. But plenty of countries don’t. All of those that do (including the US) should be proud.
True, but it still doesn’t qualify as unbelievably rare.
To expand on this, there are 196 countries in the world. As of 2012, 117 of them have electoral democracies. That’s almost 60%.
True. I didn’t see that part of the quoted post.
SpaceX and Blue Origin successfully demonstrated reusable rockets. And SpaceX is on the verge of human spaceflight - something only 3 governments have done so far.
And NASA’s science missions have been impressive too. Lots of small satellites that may never make the news, but still making important discoveries.
Ditto on The National Park System.
eh?
Yeah
My sense is that, as bad as race relations may become in the US, in general we as a country are very open to the idea of immigration, and as cliched a phrase as it is, we really are a melting pot. Right now I live in Southern California, and basically every single person I work with is the child or grandchild of immigrants from 5-6 different countries. We all speak with American accents, all make the same pop-culture references, wear the same type of clothes and eat the same food. And I don’t really think the few white and black people among us really see us as “other.” Granted, this isn’t really typical of the whole country. But I grew up in a small Southern town, and while there were fewer immigrants, I never felt ostracized because of my race.
The only other country I know reasonably well is India. My family is from a large city there (maybe the equivalent of San Jose) and, at least the last time I was there 5-6 years ago, there were very, very few non-Indian people there.
This picture was one of the first google results for “New York City Pedestrians”
This was one of the first results for “Mumbai Pedestrians”.
Another example is when I traveled to Madagascar, there was a Malagasy phrase I was using where I was pronouncing one word slightly differently than was correct (and it wasn’t a situation where a difference in pronunciation totally changed the meaning of the word). People were totally confused as to what I was saying. I got kind of frustrated that they couldn’t tease out what I was trying to communicate, but then I realized that in the US, we are just used to people with a plethora of accents and varying degrees of fluency speaking English, and we are accustomed to having to tease out what they say. To some degree it’s second nature. But in a closed-off society, it’s much harder for people to adjust to these types of things.
Yeah, but they don’t have American elections. Or beer.
And we were the first of the Modern ones. Washington transitioning to Adams set the precedent the rest of the world follows. It could have gone differently.
It’s like saying suffragettes just happened. The process for universal suffrage and full democracy began when you want it to begin: with the Greeks, maybe Magna Carta, certainly hundreds of years before the French Revolution.
To suggest it came out of the blue in the early colonies of the USA is laughable, and also disrespectful to the tens of thousands of men who died trying to wrest power from Kings and landowners. It was a process that took at least 700 years, and arguably two thousand.
You might as well say the notion of no taxation without representation was a US invention.
This is very sweet but you are missing the point. You and your fellow immigrants, like in the UK , in Germany this year and throughout most of the developed world, are here to address a particular issue: white people getting older and older and the social security system being designed for a conventional histogram and not relative low birth rates.
You are here to breed and to pay taxes. Of course you should make the most of it, but that is the economic truth of all developed societies with social security systems (and in the case of the USA, military).
It aint some sentimental trip.
So it’s lucky I didn’t say any of those things. America invented what we think of as modern Democracy (not out of whole cloth but yes they invented something new) and proved it could work. Is that really a controversial statement?
I may not like the politics or the game of “musical vacuum cleaners” that happens regularly re: who hoses money from whom. I do like its culture; its a culture that I understand, that makes sense to me, and that I ‘get’.
I can walk into a bar in any state in the US that I have ever visited, buy a drink, and BS with the people there. I’ll get what they are saying (and why), they’ll get what I’m saying (and why), and while we might not agree on all things, we can honestly Talk… and have a good time doing so.
The main street may change more from Bedford Falls to the crappy store-front casinos of Pottersville than I’d like (cue legislation pending to bring casinos to the Chromium Fountains of Jersey City) but underneath it all most of the people are good people*.
*Once they turn off their Talk Radio, their Political Agenda channels, and their Talking-Point web sites, that is. My cite is my observations during natural disasters when for a short time we have all pulled together… and when, for a short time, we stop having poison poured constantly into our ears.
This doesn’t even make sense. You seem to be talking about an abstract concept playing a part in social evolution. Wave that flag!
Other countries have immigration too, you know. It’s really not that special.
It makes a ton of sense. Until America became a Representative Democracy, the natural order was that power flowed from the state to the people and Monarchies were the order of the day. If America had lost the Revolution or if the American Experiment had failed in its infancy for some reason there was no reason to think any of that would have changed any time soon.
The World wasn’t sitting there checking its watch and tapping its feet saying, “I wish America would get here soon so we can have some Democracies.” That form of government started to flourish because of America’s success and it only existed at that time because of the Founding Fathers. They built on the past and created something new that the World eventually emulated (and arguably improved on in some ways).
Umm… aren’t you forgetting Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister of the Great Britain, who resigned and was peacefully succeeded by Spencer Compton?