As readers of Affinity know, I was growing up until 13 years of age in a totalitarian state with little real autonomy, an effective satellite of USSR. I also grew up in a poor family so it was a bit of an uphill financial struggle for me to get a university education.
Towards the end of my education I had to decide how to actually start my independence and one of the options that presented themselves in 2000 was to go to USA with a “Work And Travel” program and J1 visa. I might write about my American adventure maybe some more later, today I wish to only briefly discuss the question in the title, which in various forms was posited to me in later years from many people here, old as well as young.
Even before venturing to USA I was of the opinion that it is a proto-fascist state and my opinion was further solidified by my experiences there.
So my answers at that time were these four points:
- Crappy healthcare. I have met ordinary people fearing that a simple case of flu might send them down the spiral of personal bankruptcy. I have seen outrageous prices for one course of antibiotics. I knew that USA had, in contrast to European countries, no universal healthcare, but seeing it first hand was a real eye opener. Fear of loosing even the crappy health insurance provided by the employer kept many people in essential slavery, when the were putting up with blatant abuse by their managers. For my friends I summed this argument up as “if I have grown up in USA, I would not live to become an adult, because my parents would not be able to pay for the medication I needed”.
- Crappy education. I have already mentioned that for me to get a university education was an uphill struggle. I was not bad student, but I am not so intelligent as to be able to study and work (not to mention that job availability was not that great – unemployment rate 8%), so I had only negligible income and I had to rely on my parents, which was hard – I had to live by with about 100,-$ a month to pay for my lodgings, food, books etc. For my friends I summed this argument up as “in USA I would not get a university degree, because even without tuition fees it was not cheap and with tuition fees it would be ruinous”.
- The mony that I made n USA was worthless there, it only had worth here because of the very favourable exchange rate. In US, the measly 5.50$/h were to barely live by – even though as a student I was tax exempt. So staying in USA would mean to lock myself into perpetual poverty. I find it incredible how many of my peers with university education failed to grasp this reality, that money’s worth is contextual and 1.000,-$ monthly income in USA is shit, whilst being absolutely amazing and nearly unattainable here. I tried to sum it up as “for the money I was making there, I could not even rent a flat. And I would be forced to do work well bellow my qualification even for that. Here, I could use it to at least repair my house.”
- Absolutely inane laws and judiciary process. I have always thought that outcome of a judicial case should not be decided by a bunch of barely literate amateurs and that precedent law should not still be employed in any civilised country. And what I particularly did not admire was the “sue happy” culture in USA, where people try to win the lottery by suing each other for money. And the lack of properly functional system for “ex officio” advocates for people who cannot afford to pay. I summed it up as “any time you could get sued by some idiot over some trivial thing and if they could afford better lawyer than you, you are screwed”.
And mind you, this all was in 2000. The only progress that I see from behind the Atlantic was on health care, everything else got much worse since then. And it seems that USA is managing to drag back the rest of the world as well – in last decade or so the main American exports are jingoism and creationism.
The USA was never democracy and never free. It only managed to convince its enslaved citizens that they are free. I am entirely content with my decision to not even try to live there permanently.
You left out guns.
I’m baffled why anyone with any choice in the matter would continue to live there. If you’re poor, it’s horrible, and if you’re independently wealthy there are much, much nicer places to live. And yet still people try to get there. /shrug/ They see something I don’t -- or don’t see (or don’t care about) something I do.
The American Dream is the greatest con job of all times.
Those are fair points, but I think the question of whether to live in one country over another varies widely from person to person. I have a relative who has lived in both Germany and the US and can list different things that he prefers about both countries, but ultimately they and their spouse (who is a German citizen) chose the US. One factor was that they were able to make a much higher salary in their chosen profession in the US than Germany. A second thing that they prefer about the US is the public schools for their children. This may seem surprising, given that US public schools rank lower than many in Europe, but the state that they live in has some of the best public schools in the US on average. One has to keep in mind that the quality of public education in the US varies enormously from state to state. The best states are among the best in the developed world, the worst states are among the worst in the developed world. Internally, the US is very diverse in living standards, education, etc.
As for whether the “American Dream” is a reality or a myth, I think that also depends on who you ask. I know that I do have ancestors who came to the US slightly more than a century ago from Poland and Italy who probably did find greater opportunity for success and social mobility than they would have had in their own countries. Ancestors from the other side of my family were from Germany and had a little more money when they arrived in the US, and I can’t say whether they would have had the same economic opportunities in Germany or not. Physically, all of my ancestors were certainly a lot safer in the US than they would have been in Europe during the world wars. In short, for at least part of my family, the upward mobility of the American Dream was quite real. For many other people in the US, it was also real. For many others, it was not real. Generalizations can be dangerous.
Well, the land of oportunity that allowed people hunderd years ago to have more opportunities for success and social mobility was made possible by a genocide.
Making more money in US than in Germany in your chosen pofeession sounds great. But so does the fact that in Germany, when you or a family member get sick, that money does not burn away on medical costs. In fact, I know people who made the exact opposite choice -- they have USA citizenship, but prefer living in Germany in part for the reasons stated (and others, like pervasive racism).
Springa73
I’ll grant you that for the world wars. I’ll grant you that for many more wars, but for many wars since WWII the truth is that the USA made the world very unsafe for quite a lot of people. I don’t think “we murder a lot of people while few of our soldiers have been killed” is a really great argument if your moral standard isn’t “I got mine fuck you”.
I’m from the most working class German stock that you can imagine: miners, farmers, a “scissor sharpener*”, you name it, they probably fucked with me being the result. They were not rich people and I am the first person in the family to ever attend university. I don’t know if “opportunity” would have been greater in the USA, but I’m pretty sure that it depended less on luck and that “failure” didn’t completely wipe out opportunity and condemn people to destitute.
Right now I’m working with some of the most disadvantaged kids that there are, yet tales like I hear from the US with families living in cars and kids going hungry for a long time are still extreme exceptions which can also usually be remedied if those people seek help. If that limits my chance to “make more money”, I’m fine with it.
Apart from the fact that teachers are definitely more valued and better paid in Germany.
*Somebody who did low level smithwork, especially sharpening tools
My dad came to Canada from Germany in 1951. He was a blacksmith who retrained as a welder. I am the first person in my family to attend college and while my education wasn’t free it was relatively cheap. I graduated with only minor debt that I was able to pay off in 3 years without hardship. That would have been unlikely in the U.S.
I value the Canadian social safety net and while it has problems the vast majority of Canadians support maintaining it. I cannot understand a culture that doesn’t. Seriously, WTF is wrong with Americans. It seems like they have no concept of their own endangerment and precariousness. And their “I got mine, Fuck You” attitude seems so uncivilized. How do they manage to live together with themselves? The American Dream is the best campaign of propaganda in history.
I think that the people who do best in the US are the shonks, fast buck merchants, the liars. Honest people, not so much.
Please, ignore my previous comment. I accidentally clicked on “submit” button instead of “preview” button. Whoever can delete comments, please delete it. My real comment is under the line.
__________________________________________________________
Charly, I agree with your 4 points but I also have some objections.
Point 2: “Crappy education.”
“Education” consists of elementary, middle, college, university and other forms of (un)formal education, yet you focus only on university education. Higher education is (unfortunately) expensive and majority of people with university degrees comes from families with higher incomes. This is also truth in Europe/EU despite not being as critical as in the USA. I don’t have a problem with criticism of some aspects of US education but I do have a problem when this criticism is applied to US education in general. [that is my interpretation of Point 2]
Next, I fail to understand the meaning of your answer to springa73:
springa73 tells you that:
-- living standards in USA are very diverse
-- it varies from person to person
-- generalizations can be dangerous
and you reply only that those things were possible thanks to genocide. Genocide is horrible, true. Many people came to USA and had their “American dream”, many didn’t -- that’s simply life. In what way does genocide change the view on this fact?
I agree that for many people healthcare in US can be devastating. However, getting “sick” in USA doesn’t inherently [My interpretation of your comment. Could be wrong.] lead to “money burning away on medical costs”.
The content of your post sufficiently answers the question in its title (“why didn’t you stay in USA”). But I fear that you’re sometimes too generalising (or not, I could be just misinterpreting your post). However, I really don’t like the last few sentences:
I’d like more proffesional, objective, detailed and historical explanation that would support those statements. I don’t think that your post is such an explanation.
loplpo
If you are serious about wanting to know more you could do worse that to head over to Stderr https://freethoughtblogs.com/stderr/ on this site and read back a couple of years of the political posts. plenty of references to additional reading.
loplpo
There’s plenty of historical blogs out there you can read, and not just blogs -- actual books and articles written by professional historians that would give you all the explanations you ever needed. Start with a nice google search, and while wikipedia is not the be-all, end-all, you can find enough basic information to find references for narrowed further reading. jazzlet’s recommendation is also a very good one (see comment 10), I recommend that one.
This is not a history blog, this is an opinion-and-nice-things blog, so your request for a “more proffesional, objective, detailed and historical explanation” from someone speaking about their own personal experiences in a non-professional, casual environment is bordering on out-of-line.
+++
(Incidentally, Marcus, as much as I know and realize that the name of your blog divides as ‘std err’, I keep reading it as ‘St Derr’, and I keep making up little stories as to who St Derr actually was. Very boring little stories, but anyway. :D)
rq
Well, of course I know that there are such books, articles, stuff on wikipedia, that this blog is non-proffesional etc. I didn’t ask Charly for a research paper, I only wanted a little more profound explanation of his opinion/post (since I considered his post to be and “too casual”). I should have written it better. I’ll do my best not to behave in such “out-of-line” way again. Thank you and thanks to jazzlet, I’ll give stderr a visit.
@loplpo
You will not get one. This is not a peer reviewed historical journal, this me stating my personal opinion and reasoning behind a life joice that I have made. To reference my life’s experience in one blog post is simply not possible.
Just a few notes:
It changes it considerably for my view of it, because the “American dream” that some have obtained was only possible due to others experiencing “American nightmare”. Unless you wish to insist that enslaved blacks and slaugtered indians wer not people. So even if the “American dream” were possible now as it was possible 100-200 years ago, I (the person I am now and was 18 years ago) would not want to have anything with it because I recognize that it was only made possible by ignoring basic humanity of a lot of people.
On average it does, because Germany has universal healthcare. Of course individual people USA can be lucky enough to never have sickness serious enough to cost them too much money, and in some exceptional cases in Germany someone might have to pay a lot for treatment that is not covered, but you cannot compare living in one land with living in the other by looking at extremely good cases in the first and extremely bad cases in the other. When comparing large populations, you have to look at the averages and the distribution.
So I recommend for example this reading -click-
It took me about ten seconds to find it via google.
Quoting the most important bits:
@loplpo, I would also like to adreess sligthly this:
I am adressing only university education, because that is and was the most relevant part of it to me. And the sad truth is, that whilst there are financial barriers to obtaining higher education in EU in general and CZ in specific, they are nowhere near as big as in US.
As for the lower than university education, I have some anecdotes, but the closest to an objective evaluation are PISA scores -- and note that both CZ and Germany score higher than USA for the whole time PISA is done.