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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (60949)	10/3/2002 5:02:46 PM
From: The Philosopher	Respond to of 82486

All true. We have a myth of America as the land flowing with milk and honey, the streets paved with gold, the dream country where everybody in the world wants to live. Lile all myths, it has some basis in truth; certainly a number of people do want to live, or at least work, here, as witness our problems with illegal immigration. But for every such immigrant there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people quite happy with living right where they are, who have no desire to trade their lives for our lives. And many of the people who do want to come here do so on the basis of the TV shows they see, where everybody drives a fancy car and wears designer clothes and has perfectly coiffed hair etc. The TV shows don't show the sweatshops in NY, the migrant worker camps in California, etc. I'm not putting the US down. There are only a few other places I might prefer to live if I had a chance, and I'm too set in my ways to make the change now anyhow. This is, as Neo points out, the culture and value and social system I was born into, and I have adapted to it moderately well, despite refusing to wear a suit and insisting on going around with an ancient and battered hat, usually moderately unkempt hair, and beard. And eating weirdly. But overall, I'm content here. It's home. But nor do I have the illusion that it's Nirvana, nor that it has everything right. We have a lot of poverty here, we have a lot of loneliness, a lot of misery of various kinds, huge levels of inequality, almost intractable racism, a legal system in which money matters as much or more than truth and justice, a hubris in the international sphere which is appalling to me, and some other defects. That I can see the warts doesn't mean I don't love and appreciate this country. But it does mean that I can see reasons why people brought up with other values (such as family being more important than fame or wealth, such as the diaparity between the poorest and the wealthiest being much narrower, such as much less reliance on the legal system to arbitrate every little dispute, etc.) and other social structures could well prefer theirs to ours. Which is as it should be.