29th Aug 2022

Leaving America is the new American dream

I am born and bred in the US and I love my country. But, I agree the US has no resemblance to its former self. I believe we will not survive as a nation. It’s going to get a lot worse.

It's gotten so polarized, and both leading political parties are to blame.

This country is pretty fouled up right now and it isn't only school shootings (which only account for a small number of total violent deaths). There is a pervasive sense of anger, victimhood and lawlessness that makes living in this country very unpleasant right now.

Politicians and our news media have all done an outstanding job of dividing us into infinite factions which are very intolerant of each other. 

America has changed so drastically. It isn’t the United States of America at all. Nothing’s united about it. It’s a very weird place to live right now. This once great country has become a cesspool. The "experiment" is coming to a dramatic and quick conclusion.

Leaving America is the new American dream

Everything’s ridiculous here. I’m fed up with people getting killed every day. God knows how many people have been shot in school shootings. And there was that mass shooting in Vegas at that concert… It’s crazy, If I had the means, I'd certainly consider it if I had young children.   

Not sure why anyone would want to live in the U.S. now? One nation under guns and the American Taliban is taking over. From abortion, guns to climate change, America is a right-wing bastion.

Life in the United States is more frightening than ever. It's not wrong to feel afraid of leaving the house and getting shot at church, the market, school, a concert, a movie theater, or any other place that we go on a regular basis.

It's got so bad that I often think: ‘Oh God, please don’t let me wake up tomorrow morning.'

It has become more like the lawless west. Everyone needs to learn how to handle a gun and carry it everywhere now. It's out of control. 

My neighbor's son moved out of the country a couple of years ago primarily because of this issue. He has two small children and said he wasn't going to take the chance of them being slaughtered in their own classroom. The quality of life is much better in many other countries. 

US ranked among worst countries to raise a family, study says

NYPost: To determine the most and least family-friendly countries, 35 OECD countries (part of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development forum) were rated according to safety, happiness, cost, health, education and time.

The US clocked in at an abysmal 34th place, just ahead of last-place finisher Mexico, whose murder rate jumped to the highest in nearly two years as drug cartels have run amok during the coronavirus lockdown.

Case in point: The red-white-and-blue came in dead last in terms of time — which the “Raising a Family Index” (RAFI) gauged by maternity leave, vacation days and other factors — and cost, as measured by out-of-pocket health spending, cost of living, income ratio and more.

The study noted that the US is the only country that doesn’t require employers to offer maternity leave. Even worse, the average household blows 31.79% of their income on child care compared to the 4 to 10% spent by Scandinavian nations.

Most surprising was America’s global safety rating, which was, according to the research, the second-poorest after Mexico.

America reportedly tops the list in school shootings with a whopping 288 incidents from 2009 to 2018, with Mexico placing second at eight and all other countries recording zero, per the study.

The Land of the Free also came in “fourth-worst” for human rights — here defined broadly across several categories including “protection against enslavement, the right to free speech and the right to education.”

20% of Americans are suffering from mental health issues each year and the suicide rate has “increased by 33% between 1999 to 2017.” 

America is a deeply troubled country, it doesn’t, and never did, line up with its own ideology.

US Ranks Among Worst Countries in the World to Live In

Newsweek: The United States is now ranked among the world's worst places to move to, due to rapidly increasing costs of living, health care and basic education.

The sixth annual report from Expat Insider found the U.S. ranked 47th out of 64 countries rated in the survey.

More than half, 55 percent, were appalled by the costs and about three-quarters said child care simply is not affordable.

One-in-three expats who came to the U.S. said their income increased in America, but they said this was dramatically offset by higher daily expenses which overshadowed their household income.

Yes, America Is Worse Than Bad After All.

Medium: I just read an article about America is not that bad after all, and how many people still move here from all over the world. Well, let me correct this myth. It is not from all over but mostly from the Latin American countries followed by Asia. 

Americans, stop believing that the rest of the world wants to migrate to your country. More people are immigrating to the EU than the US.

The bottom line America is expensive for Europeans and offers a worse quality of life.

The US is really expensive compared to any metropolitan city in the EU. For example, in Barcelona, you can still have a decent life and rent an apartment average price of 950 Euros in the center of the city, in Denver the average rent is $1500, I am sure in downtown Denver the price is higher.

In addition, food of exceptional quality is significantly more expensive in the United States than in Europe. Even organic food in the United States was not as good or delicious as typical food in Spain.

Despite the salaries being 3 times higher than in Europe, you as a resident spend much more. The average home to buy in the US is over $400k, in the EU you can still afford to buy in some countries a house for less than $150k.

America has the highest rate of mental illness and suicide. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. — that’s 20% — experiences mental illness in a given year. One in 24 — about 4% — has a serious mental illness that interferes with or limits one or more major life activities.

The US is facing an opioid pandemic. In 2016, there were more than 63,600 drug overdose deaths in the United States — that’s 174 deaths per day. And 91% of those deaths were unintentional.

There are a lot of reasons why people use opioids, but one of the main reasons is to cope with mental illness. So not only does America have the highest rate of mental illness, but they also have the highest rate of drug addiction.

The US also has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. There are more than 2 million people in prison in the United States.

The US is one of the most dangerous countries in the world. There is no guarantee of safety in the US, no matter where you live or how much money you have. In 2021, there were more than 24,576 homicides in the United States.

Healthcare is not accessible, expensive, and often inadequate. Healthcare is not accessible to everyone in the United States. There are more than 31 million people in the US who don’t have health insurance.

And even if you do have health insurance, it doesn’t mean that you’re actually going to be able to get the care that you need. The leading cause of bankruptcy is medical bills. In 2021, over 60% of declared bankruptcies in the United States were medical.

And even if you are able to pay for healthcare, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be good quality. The US ranks last in the developed world in terms of healthcare.

The US ranks 38th in the world in education

There are a lot of reasons why the US education system is not up to par. One of the main reasons is that the US spends more on prisons than it does on schools. In 2012, the US spent $6.4 billion on prisons and $5.7 billion on schools.

I studied in Europe and in the US, and the American education was a joke. Without many studies, I still got a 3.9 GPA. Not because I am a prodigy but because the educational system isn’t vigorous enough in comparison with EU countries.

Writing essays after essays, or passing multi-choice tests don’t prove you learned anything. For me, passing exams was simple because I have a photographic memory.

In the European Union, we have oral exams. This means that you need to be able to demonstrate your knowledge of the topic.

Even after graduating from Harvard, many Americans lack the comprehensive knowledge and strong critical thinking skills that Europeans typically have. The whole education system in the US is a scam. A medical degree in Spain costs $800 a year on average, while in the United States it costs $54,000.

The social life in the US can be quite upsetting. In the US, people are extremely divided. There are racial tensions, political divisions, and class warfare.

It’s not uncommon for people to live in their own little bubbles and only associate with people who have the same beliefs and values.

This can make it difficult to make friends and find a community. Also, the majority work some crazy hours, no time for social life. America worships individualism and doesn’t care about connection, or community.

The food in the US is often unhealthy and processed. The average American diet consists of a lot of fast food, sugary drinks, processed meat, and refined carbs. This type of diet is linked to an increased risk of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.

In the US, nearly 1 in 3 adults are obese. And the childhood obesity rate in the US is triple what it was in the 1970s.

Healthy food is so pricey, that only a few can afford it. A family of four spends about $1,500 a month on groceries. And that’s not even including eating out.

In reality, you would be better off living anywhere else.

America is now in fascism’s legal phase

TheGuadian: The forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems are closer than ever to winning a multi-decade national fight.

The contemporary American fascist movement is led by oligarchical interests for whom the public good is an impediment.

As in all fascist movements, these forces have found a popular leader unconstrained by the rules of democracy, this time in the figure of Donald Trump.

Donald Trump and the party that is now in thrall to him have long been exploiting fascist propaganda. They are now inscribing it into fascist policy.

There is a long history in the U.S. of business elites backing racism and fascism out of self-interest, to divide the working class and thereby destroy the labor movement.

A fascist social and political party faces pressure both to mask its connection to and to cultivate violent racist supporters, as well as its inherently anti-democratic agenda.

John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon’s top advisers, said that Nixon’s campaign and administration “had two enemies: the anti-war left and Black people”, and invented the drug war to target both:

"You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

The Nazis recognized that the language of family, faith, morality and homeland could be used to justify especially brutal violence against an enemy represented as being opposed to all these things.

During this time, it was possible for many non-Jewish Germans to deceive themselves about the brutal nature of the regime, to tell themselves that its harsh means were necessary to protect the German nation from the insidious threat of communism.

We are now in fascism’s legal phase. According to the International Center for Not for Profit Law, 45 states have considered 230 bills criminalizing protest, with the threat of violent leftist and Black rebellion being used to justify them. That this is happening at the same time that multiple electoral bills enabling a Republican state legislature majority to overturn their state’s election have been enacted suggests that the true aim of bills criminalizing protest is to have a response in place to expected protests against the stealing of a future election (as a reminder of fascism’s historical connection to big business, some of these laws criminalize protest near gas and oil lines).

In 2021, legislators in 19 states passed laws making access to the ballot more difficult, some with specific (and clearly intentional) disparate impact on minority communities (as in Texas). 

Fascism feeds off a narrative of supposed national humiliation by internal enemies. Defending a fictional glorious and virtuous national past, and presenting its enemies as deviously maligning the nation to its children, is a classic fascist strategy to stoke fury and resentment.

In the first six years of Nazi rule, from 1933 to 1939, there was a harsh crackdown on the birth control movement. Led by the Gestapo, there was a punitive campaign against doctors who performed abortions on Aryan women. The recent attack on abortion rights, and the coming attack on birth control, led by a hard-right supreme court, is consistent with the hypothesis that we are, in the United States, facing a real possibility of a fascist future.

America has changed and not for the good....Put on your seat belts people we are all in for a wild ride. 

Do yourself a favor. Think for yourself. Be your own person. Question everything. Stand for principle. Champion individual liberty and self-ownership where you can. Develop a strong moral code. Be kind to others. Do no harm, unless that harm is warranted. Pretty obvious stuff...but people who hold these things in their hearts seem to be disappearing from the earth at an accelerated rate. Stay safe, my friends. Thanks for being here.

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