weird americanisms i don’t understand
In light of today’s Mid Term elections, I find it very apt to post this slightly snarky post. As someone who grew up on the Americanized internet, there were so many pecularities about it that sometimes bordered on it being an alternate reality that I didn’t understand and still don’t to this day. Yes, I’m aware of why US Americans are the way they are, but that hasn’t made their world any more digestible to me. Most of you reading this are probably Americans judging by my analytics, so I’ll be addressing you directly this time around. And by the way, despite my skepticism of your political system, if you haven’t voted yet, get off your ass and vote!
subpar or no public transportation
Imagine going out with friends to a bar or a club to get fucked up and having to drive home after that. Actually, don’t. That’t the American reality. Just the thought of having to be responsible for getting myself from point A to B sober on a regular basis gives me the chills, let alone doing that tipsy or even drunk. Add to that that a lot of you are responsible for driving others around and you have a nightmare in the making. The thought of being responsible for other people’s safety with me as the car driver terrifies me; what about you? Thankfully, the thought is just a thought for me because if I closed my eyes and waddled left or right with my arms, I’d hit one of the following: a bus, a tram, a subway, or some regional train. And they are the cheapest, fastest, and best way to get around. How do you, Americans, live without that?
Side note: We have public toilets and drinking water dispensaries everywhere you go in my city and I’m appalled that this divination of a public service hasn’t occurred to other municipalities around Europe. I go out with just my phone, headphones, and keys and can be confident that I’ll find somewhere to dump my guts out and refill my water tanks.
the issue of “medicare for all”
I’m all for removing all barriers to any care one may need in a lifetime. But what grinds my gears is that there is still discussion about public health insurance in the US to this day and it has been around for as long as I can remember. Isn’t it about time you settled the matter and got it over with? I mean, we all do just fine with our state insurance over here. We struggle with austerity that has prolonged wait times for specialist doctors or non-emergency surgeries, but it doesn’t seem to me like that is any better in your privatized hellscape. Worse, you risk going into life-destroying debt over a medical emergency and unemployment means death for many without any advantage over what I have here, in allegedly communist Europe, for free. I don’t care that my parents’ taxes fund this. I just don’t want my employment status to decide whether I live or die.
using food delivery services
I don’t know how to explain this, but if you live in a city, you shouldn’t have to use these. If I just go down the stairs from where I live, I can choose between three cuisines. If those aren’t up to my taste, I take the subway (refer to point 1) one stop in either direction and can pick and choose from cuisines and restaurants of so much variety that it overloads my ADHD brain from all the options I can choose from.
going into debt for higher education
I pay 25€ per semester to attend one of the best universities in the world. Our political science department is in the top 50 in the world and I get that for just 25€ every five months. I couldn’t fathom paying 10K per semester for this education, however meaningful and valuable it is to me. Our public universities here are so good that people look down on private degrees because they tend to be easier to get.
We have idiotic liberals over here that argue that the only answer to the current austerity wave at public universities is privatization, but they remain a minority because of how idiotic that proposal is. As a student, you are already in a precarious situation where you’re supposed to be studying full-time and might be working part-time to sustain yourself. Imagine, on top of that, having to worry about whether your future job chances will decide whether you can pay off your incurred debt. Again, not necessary to imagine since you’re likely an American anyway.
every election being the most important election of your lives
With every election in your country, a lot of (liberal) activists mobilize for a get-out-the-vote campaign with some argument or another about how this is “the most important election of our lives” and yet the outcome is always either more of the same or a worse version of the same. This is why I’m perplexed at the newly minted slogans since Trump’s return that are a variation of “protect democracy.” What democracy? It doesn’t seem like you have much choice either way.
gerrymandering and the electoral college
US liberals are always so pissed at Republican gerrymandering in red states to maximize their chances of maintaining their power. It is understandable that one would be pissed at this, but I would expect them to at least attempt to address this beyond just voting harder for Democrats. If you were really serious about “one person, one vote” and “government by the people for the people,” then you would at least do away with majoritarian representation and replace it with proportional representation. Then it wouldn’t matter how voting district lines are drawn because everybody would be represented and not just the majority. But proposing any solution to a grave problem like this would mean changing things in tangible ways which neither party would benefit from. If anything, it would introduce more party competition and a relative loss in power for the two, current parties who would likely have to share power in coalition governments.
Similarly, the electoral college is another layer of voter suppression that receives occasional outcry every election cycle, but no proposals to do away with it because the rulers benefit from it. The reason why it is voter suppression is because it makes it pointless to vote if your state is known to have a majority favoring one of the parties. And the winner takes it all anyway.
For me as an outsider, it’s always so tiring seeing you have the same conversations and “debates” over and over with no implementation of a solution in sight. Which brings me back to my question in point 5: What democracy are you protecting?
census data including “racial” categories
If you wanted to overcome racism, wouldn’t you do away with racializations? The rationale for including “racial” categories in census data is likely so that policy can specifically target them. But that’s such a clear dead end. Liberal welfare states make use of means testing to dispense with welfare and therefore stigmatize dependency. If one of the means is belonging to one “racial” category or not, then they also promote division and end up intensifying racialization rather than overcoming it. If you want to help racialized minorities in the long term, you wouldn’t need census data for that. To help people long term and to overcome “racial” hierarchies, you’d need universalist policies that apply to everyone that might want to use them.
The funniest thing about this data is that it cannot account for the reality of ethnic and “racial” diversity in the US. For example, Arab Americans don’t receive their own category and end up identifying with one of the other ones depending on skin tone, therefore worsening the pre-existing colorist prejudices among Arab communities. Moreover, it makes them invisible as an electorate (until they tip the scale like in 2024) and recipients of welfare.
conclusion
Can we de-Americanize the internet and, further, the world?
I wish I knew less about you. I wish entering online spaces didn’t mean that I’d be bombarded with your cultural pecularities at every turn, and that everyone would assume that I’m American and therefore well-versed in your cultural norms. And what I wish the most is that your elections’ outcomes wouldn’t matter so much on the world stage that I had to study your political system to understand your political culture’s idiocy.