@horgen said:
@n64dd said:
It seems with the racial divide, people not liking the president on here, and just general disgust it seems people don't like this country.
Do you like it? If so why? Do you not like it? Explain.
For tourists, politics and racial divide does not matter that much. As for living there. Maybe in one of the bigger cities. Given that I have never visited USA it is difficult to say anything actually. Visiting NYC is on my bucket list.
I was thinking of avoiding this hornet's nest, but what the hell, I'm always up for a good kick. I absolutely hate living in this country. Visiting it is probably pretty nice, living here is a different story, and it's not much better in the cities. It's just different. I went to college in a southern town, and a lot of the stereotypes are true. I heard white people drop N-bombs more times than I can remember, the local police were always harsher on the black residents, and we even had the police chief cover up the murder of a person of color. It creates a pretty bad environment where everyone's suspicious of everyone else. I know it was easier for me to live there than it is for a black person, but it's still not my definition of fun.
I didn't see a whole lot of that growing up near a major city, but they have their own problems. Rent is goddamn outrageous. I'm not kidding, it's not unusual for people to spend 70% of their paychecks on rent. You would think all that money would buy decent apartments, but you're lucky if you get a landlord that will fix basic things after you ask nicely several times. In my first apartment one of our pipes busted and they didn't fix it for about six weeks, after it had leaked out into our hallway and started growing mold. At my current apartment I've got a good for nothing handyman who complains nonstop about how everyone makes so much more money than him, but it takes me weeks to get him to do something like replace a busted lock or clean out the storage space they promised me.
And don't get me started on the jobs. People regularly commute well over an hour just to work ten, twelve dollar an hour jobs. It's not abnormal for people to work 60+ hours a week, and they get treated like crap. They get treated like they're pampered when they're working their asses off just to scrape by. Benefits? Medical? Paid leave? Most people I know think these are pipe dreams. They work their asses off just so they can give over half of it away to rent, and most of the rest to buy "generous" medical plans offered through their jobs, if their jobs even have them. Then you have to count in costs of transportation, because there's not a lot of good public transportation outside of the big cities (one thing they have going for them). Owning a car is a necessity for most people, but all the federal licensing, local licensing, maintenance, and gas cuts into the paycheck even further.
Oh, and let's talk about the schools. Let's talk about the fact that they're locally funded, so if you want to live in a neighborhood with good services (parks and the like) you'll probably be paying through the nose in property taxes. The costs of college? The cheap option will be over two grand per semester, and you're likely to run up twenty grand in debt at a state university. You're also pretty much expected to be working at the same time, which means you get to deal with all of the other crap, and watch your money drain into the black hole of American education, and the normal stresses of working and studying. Oh, and the fun part is that if you ever complain about any of this you get labelled as entitled.
Which brings me to my least favorite part, all the jerks waiting to tell anyone complaining about anything how little their opinion matters. You have people using religion to justify all sorts of personal crusades and vendettas, against abortion, birth control, LGBT rights. You get people all over trying to shove their religious beliefs down everybody else's throats. You get people going on rants about how liberals are all part of a secret plot to destroy the country, with liberals in the same damn room. Dylann Roof was not a surprise to me, the surprise is that stuff like that doesn't happen more often. If you go read some stories about the sort of stuff the websites that he frequented said, that kind of rhetoric is frighteningly common.
And you know what, the liberals aren't a cakewalk to be around either. Don't get me wrong, they're much better than the Fox News crowd that acts all surprised at the Dylann Roofs, but then goes around peddling extremism as innocuous commentary. Still, it gets to the point sometimes where they see any sort of disagreement as heresy. The "traitors to the cause" rhetoric scares me just as much as they "traitors to the nation" rhetoric, and they're both way too common.
Long story short, if you live in a place with decent social services, a decent standard of living, and not too much social unrest just stay there. Take a vacation to see the sights, then go back to a country that cares about its citizens.
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