America is a sick society

[Odin]

(06-29-2017, 11:45 AM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:

(06-29-2017, 10:32 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Donald Trump is as much symptom as cause. We have the severest economic inequality since the 1920s, and that is without regional under-development of the sort that existed in the 1920s or the institutional racism as it was known to exist as late as the 1960s. White privilege may be real, but it is not so severe that being a Mexican-American in Houston is worse for one's hopes in life than is being white in southeastern Kentucky.

Tolerance and inclusion? The UK looks like paradise in contrast to America. But then, Britain abolished slavery thirty years before the USA, didn't need a bloody civil war to decide that slavery was unsuited to a modern society, and never went through a Jim Crow era in any of its colonies except in South Africa.

Health and wellness? Is the image of Americans developing the bulk of football linebackers while drinking sodas or beer and eating chips while watching TV unique to America?

Europe has its sucky points though. Sure, they may seem to have more social justice than the US. But, in Europe, you need to be white to make it past a certain level. And even what type of white (or more properly, Caucasian) one is matters a lot. The native born, native ethnic still occupy the most important slots. Who your parents are / were, where you went to school, etc, matter a lot. The notion of a self made person is rare. This is one of the reasons why the social safety nets there are so extensive - the ability to be self made or reinvent is much less than here. This is why the rising inequality and bad trend in business formation here in the US are so sad. We have traditionally been exceptional in these regards, and this was noted even way back when by De Toqueville. That made up in many ways for our relatively smaller and less centralized government and lack of social safety net as compared with post mid-19th Century Europe. But now ... we are losing those traditional advantages.

I think this is why Obama was treated basically like a rock star by Europe, he was basically a symbol, in a good way, of what makes the US different from Europe.