How do I see America and how does it see itself?

Politics & Current Affairs
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I haven’t been the the US in a long time… decades. I live in Canada. The information I receive about the US is through various sorts of media. Depending on how one judged, even for a Canadian, I think I might qualify as being quite to the left of the spectrum (although by temperament I think most would think of me as a centrist). I try to avoid the sort of extreme media that algorithms inevitably want to feed a person, but no doubt I exists in some form of “left” bubble.

It was always the case, and has been much more so recently, that the state of politics in the US has a surprising effect on my life as a citizen of another country, so I do my best to evaluate that state of affairs the best I can, but I am worried that without a “feet on the ground” view, it is difficult to assess the degree of bias I am getting from my media consumption. I’d like some feedback from people living in the US about what their actual experience is in some specific areas.

  1. The prevalence of gun violence. Canada doesn’t have especially restrictive gun regulations, all things considered, but it does not appear to have the “gun culture” that the US appears to have. Gun ownership appears to be very common, and from my vantage, it looks like gun violence is very frequent. In nearly 60 years of life here, I was once in a situation where I was concerned for my safety because of a gun bearing person (actually 2, but the second involved an undercover cop who apologized profusely for letting his firearm be seen). I think my experience is on the rare side from the conversations I’ve had (or notably haven’t had), as most people around me seem to have not had any such experiences. What are your experiences with gun violence? Is it more common to be in a dangerous situation involving fire arms?

  2. Health Care poverty. It is my understanding that without proper medical insurance, medical debt can easily bankrupt a person. I don’t fully appreciate how onerous good health insurance is to obtain and maintain. I also don’t know how common problematically poor insurance coverage is (you hear a lot about HMO issues on medical drama’s). What is your experience with extreme financial duress due to health insurance concerns?

  3. Policing trust - this is probably going to be trickier to get a good read on. Young men in low socio-economic demographics seem to be more likely to perceive police as a threat, all things equal, regardless of the facts of the matter. If the facts of the matter support the perceived threat, then it’s difficult to judge degree well. So I’m glad to hear from everyone, but am curious to hear from women or people in a mid to high socio-economic demographic what their experience with police are.

Another thing that to my subjective eye seems to be the case that I’d be curious to hear comment on is the general Overton window regarding economic ideology, which seems to have shifted very far right in the last 40 years or so. Do you agree?

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I think gun violence is happening a lot in the US, but I only know of media stories as I don’t get out much anyway. But I wouldn’t want to be a student today in these schools. We did not have shootings like this, as far as I know, back in the 80s through 90s when I was in school.

Health care is atrocious here. Without insurance you could easily be bankrupted. Two Tylenol at a hospital will run you $20 to $30 dollars. That’s two pills. And the care you get is not that good either. Most doctors barely give you 20 minutes. If you don’t make a list of everything you want to discuss, you won’t have time to remember during the visit.

I have not had any issues with authority figures, but I’m a white woman. I do remember going to the store late one night with a friend of mine who was a very big, black guy. The cops stopped us and kept asking him where he was going and his answers were not good enough. I finally got impatient and said, “Oh my god, we are just going to the store.” They literally were like ok have a nice night after that. Seemed pretty racist to me.

I’m not sure how to answer about the Overton window in regard to economic policies. If we are referencing what politicians are able to get away with saying, then I’d say way too much nonsense in general. But I think that is because people aren’t thinking, they are emoting to the tune of whatever identity they’ve chosen.

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  1. Gun violence is notable. I don’t know what to say except schools are vigilant and zero tolerant.
  2. Yes, without your employer bankrolling your health insurance, you’re SOL. Also, high deductible can screw you up.
  3. I don’t have experience with the police. I think this is the least of your worries.

I think the order of dangers, from high anxiety to low, is this:

  1. Healthcare costs
  2. Inflation, especially rent
  3. Gun violence

The percentage of people living in their vehicle has risen by almost 50% since just before COVID-19 .

There is now a resurgence of the word unhoused to include the people living in their vehicle.

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  1. It is not very common, despite the press’ coverage. Gun violence is sporadic at best, though the record is still unbeaten in terms of firearm-related homicides.
    As for why it is indeed notable, in the early United States, it was necessary for the average citizen to be in possession of a firearm, resulting in the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, stating thus:
    “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
    As is evident, the Drafters of the Constitution did not live to see automatic weaponry. It was not as easy to commit random acts of gun violence as it is now due to advances in gun technology. US gun culture has stuck with the belief that the right to bear arms, no matter the weaponry, is a firm safeguard of democracy, despite the fact that the United Kingdom, for example, itself a democracy, has clearly been able to safeguard its own democracy. Simply put, it is a flimsy excuse. It is important to note, though, that it is not necessarily more common to be in dangerous situations with firearms. Firearms are still illegal to be loaded in public, and the police, despite their many shortcomings (ex: Uvalde) tend to respond seriously, which brings me to the next point that I think I should bring up.

  2. The police are not trusted for many reasons, especially among youth. The primary reason is the many cases of racist views and police brutality. As an example, the murder of George Floyd. I am not sure if you know this story, but Floyd had the police called on him in Minneapolis, Minnesota due to obtaining counterfeit money. Upon arrival, the police treated it as a much more serious offense than it was, and one of the officers placed his knee upon Floyd’s neck. Floyd’s air flow was instantly cut off, and he begged with the officer that he could not breathe. The officer, however, did not stop, and Floyd was killed. It was ruled a homicide in court a year later. This is simply a more recent example, however. The Los Angeles Riots of 1994 were caused by an incident very similar to the murder of George Floyd. Simply put, trust in the police dropped significantly due to these incidents of police brutality. Another comment here that brings up the police focusing particularly on a black man is a great example. Very little has been done to combat this, and politicians continue to blame supposed “criminals”, doing very little to hide their disdain for African-Americans.

That is all I will say for now. Thank you for reading.

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Lived here all my life. When I was a kid there were around 250 million Americans, and now there are over 330 million I think. Lots of us.

The vast majority of this vast nation (like Canada), is peaceful, and the people you meet are usually good to exceptional. If you humbly ask for help, most Americans will go out of their way if they can to help.

In the big cities you have to smart, but mostly the same thing (it’s just your odds go up of meeting a problem).

  1. Gun violence is really not an issue, except for some neighborhoods in the big cities. It’s a fantastic political frisbee because if you are pro guns, you can talk about how you are pro freedom and self-government; if you are anti-guns, you can talk about all the victims of gun violence. But the pro-freedom gun people look like militia groups prepping for their takeover. And the anti-gun people look incompetent and incoherent when it comes to saving any lives. But all of that is the bullshit that is the political gun issue - nothing really to do with reality. Tons of Americans own guns and our society is awash in guns (like it is awash in everything else under the sun), and per capita there are 10 better problems to fight for if you really wanted to save lives, and the pro-gun doomsdayers are kidding themselves too. Guns do good, guns do bad, we should make smart policy, we should lighten up - all of these are true. You might go your whole life and never be near a gun that goes off, no matter where you live (except for maybe the heart of some of the worst neighborhoods in Chicago, LA, Baltimore, Detroit, Philadelphia cities where people are murdered everyday.) Guns are a political frisbee, but not an issue for a serious person. The gun issue will never go away as long as they don’t repeal the 2nd Amendment, and the issue is too lucrative to let slip away. But it’s a waste of time. Not one of these shootings can be stopped by anyone but police boots or military boots on the ground. Everyone serious knows that. No one is really worried about being shot.

Don’t listen to the media. Haven’t we all learned that yet? The protests in France are both peaceful and scary, simultaneously, and the media tells one or the other, never the truth.

  1. Health care costs are insane. So now health insurance is more important than drinking water or oxygen. I think the government made this problem when they incentivized employer sponsored healthcare. Now healthcare costs can rise like college tuition later would, because more and more people got health insurance (like college kids got loans backed by government), so health insurance holds all the keys to how much oxygen and water. In the end, it seems to me the lesson should be more government isn’t going to help more people receive more healthcare that is already distortedly expensive. But what the hell do I know. In the end, yes, healthcare costs are so high, people without insurance are going bankrupt or struggling their whole lives because of a healthcare bill that wasn’t adequately insured. Not as many as the media likes to highlight, but it happens. But I’d say the healthcare and health provision issue is a much bigger more complex issue than anyone ever talks about, so really the conversation is another total bullshit political frisbee that will not be changed for the better the way both parties handle the issue.
  2. Police trust is at an all time low. When I was a kid, all kids and all criminals hated the cops. Kids hated the cops because, in my neighborhood, we were always up to no good at some point. So you sort of grew up thinking the cops were the enemy. But ultimately, most people grew up and realized they needed cops, and respected the individuals who took risks, found the murdered bodies, arrived first at all the fatal car accidents, etc. etc. etc. At the same time, everyone saw police brutality happened, police corruption, remembered their youth when all cops seemed bad. In the end, trust in police is now a political frisbee too. So much utter bullshit. Hating ICE, for instance, is purely fed by the media. When people see cops or ICE raiding something, their first thought isn’t “those poor people being oppressed by those fascists” it’s “what the hell did those people do to bring the cops down on themselves.” Most people don’t hate the police, half the country likes and appreciates the police. 30% of the country who are vocal, just talk shit a lot against the police. Police trust is such a sad issue.

I’m about to drive 11 hours to South Carolina from my home around Philadelphia, and 11 hours back after 5 days. I’ll report all the gun violence, healthcare complaints and scary police I encounter. Probably nothing. I’d say the most serious problem that government needs to work on above is the healthcare health insurance issue. The police trust is not a government issue, except for the corruption and brutality, which are the exception (despite the media). The way to fix that is to grow up. Guns aren’t a real issue at all.

The issue in the US is the issue in the world - international order relies on national order first, and no one is taking care of themselves very well, yet expecting some international savior to materialize. I suspect this is cyclical, except this time, the scale of brutality will be massive.

We all need a world where the government does its job and only its job, and everyone else can take care of politics in their town and not give a shit about the rest of the world, because the rest of the world is doing the same. We are all busy playing geo-strategist, secretary of war, global economist - and we use the media for our fact gathering. Total mess.

But ask all the FIFA visitors this summer how America seems.

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I find some of the commentary difficult to reconcile with the objective statistics.The US has gun crime and gun homicide at over 6x the per capita rate of Canada, who is the second highest among 1st world countries, yet I am being advised not to believe the media.

I wonder if there is a little boiling frog syndrome happening. I wonder if we have a different idea of what amount of gun violence would be considered a problem?

I frequently find talking to Americans about some of these issues to be frustrating, as much of the world has gun violence pretty well controlled, health care systems that generally serves their populace, and a pretty high level of trust in the police. Yet people often don’t seem to think these facts are in any way relevant.

Sadly, American politics affects my life as a Canadian. Gas prices and the general inflation they drive aren’t just high in the US.

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One murder per year is too many murders to me. But murder isn’t the only way people die, and no government can solve all issues.

Sure, when you take away people’s freedom you take away their freedom to be violent. Freedom or low murder rates because the government has a big thumb - choose your favorite poison.

I’m sure the US murder rate is 6x the Canadian (or just much higher). But if you made Canada have a population of 330 million, and gave half of them guns, who knows who would murder more.

I think one of the problems globalism and modern international news have created is everyone thinking our cultures translate. I mean, Canada and the US are probably closer cultures than most comparisons, but saying China has less murder or more murder than the US and trying to compare what government policies help this and hurt this - that’s art at best, if not alchemy of a science.

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I’m confused. Are you not at all concerned that your citizenry die at a much higher rate than the rest of the developed world? Or do you think “that’s the price of freedom”?

I don’t think I understand what point you’re making. I suspect that if you imitated the US in terms of gun availability and population density, you’d get a more similar outcome. It seems obvious to me that the fact that the US has the highest per-capita gun ownership and the highest levels of gun crime are at least somewhat related.

I am looking at modern, democratic, first world nations. Of course all nations are different, but I really don’t understand how Americans are so frequently blasé about such a staggeringly high comparable number of deaths (or medical bankruptcy). To me, it would be like if someone told me that we found a way to eradicate all cancer in women, and just said “Well good for them, but men are different. Besides, we die of lots of other things too, so no point wasting time looking at how things work for a totally different gender. We have other fish to fry.” It really does feel that absurd to me.

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Freedom is doing a lot of lifting here. In America there is a reckless tendency to view opportunity as freedom.

This accounts for the expanding list of legalized opportunities that flourish in the face of declining freedoms.

In America, the PLCAA (Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act) has given the gun industry in America a free pass on liability and accountability…and it does it by proclaiming the act supports the “freedom” to own a weapon.

So much of America’s identity revolves around guns that any attempt to introduce logic into the debate is quickly shouted down as anti-American.

Let me take a brief aside. In America, in 49 of the 50 States, you are required to prove insurance to operate your motor vehicle. New Hampshire, the sole outlier, requires you prove financial means to cover damages, but I digress…

Currently, NO State requires you to have liability insurance on your firearm. New Jersey tried, but the courts ruled it unconstitutional as gun laws require historical analogues from the founding era. Funny, they had no problem abandoning chattel laws…

Couple this with the doctrine of “suppressive volume”, or spray and prey as we used to call it, and you now see a plethora of semi-automatic pistols and long rifles being flooded towards an eager paranoid public…

One has to ponder the validity of the threat that precipitates such a vast public arsenal…

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Gun culture doesn’t translate directly into gun violence. Some of the states with the lowest homicide rates (Idaho’s murder rate is lower than Toronto’s) have the most enthusiastic gun culture. Meanwhile , liberal cities like Chicago are supportive of gun control laws, yet have high murder rates. Meanwhile, New York City went from one of the highest murder rates in the country in the early 1990’s to one of the lowest in a few years, not due to gun laws but in part to innovative integration of computer databases with real time crime reports.

I live in Chicago, and 80% of the murders occur in a handful of economically decimated neighborhoods far removed from the tourist zones. This doesn’t mean the rest of the city is murder-free, but it’s hardly the wild west.I walk for miles at night through the neighborhoods near me and while I am always vigilant, I have never directly witnessed gun violence.

As to why the U.S. has historically been a more violent country than other western nations, I don’t think it’s specifically due to a ‘gun culture’. And while I support restrictions on firearms, I don’t think that would magically change or eliminate our propensity for violence.

My best guess as to the connection between violence and the American character is that many immigrants made a bargain when coming here. They would be willing to sacrifice a safety net, both economically and culturally, of stability and protection, for the sake of freely pursuing dreams. From the beginning , this country was a volatile mix of often conflicting idealogies, faiths and values. It was a place to come to re-invent oneself and maybe disappear. This sense of anonymity may have brought with it the belief that violence could succeed in helping one free oneself from
repressive situations in a country that wasn’t locked into rigid social codes making anonymity impossible.

Many of us feel that while the price we pay for our diminished psychological safety net includes economic anxiety, social isolation and the threat of violence, the benefit is a relentlessly creative social soup that at least until recently included the promise of economic prosperity.

Some here treat the expression ‘Canada nice’ as interchangeable with ‘Canada bland’. It may be a grossly unfair characterization, but there is a sense that in Canada, Sweden and other Western countries where the priority is more on social equality than individual initiative, a certain creative edge is dulled. Not because of the policies themselves, but because of the cultural consensus toward safety over audacity they may reflect.

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In a word: plutocracy.

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Our murder rates are high – although not as high as in many other countries. Almost twice as many U.S. citizens die of gun induced suicide as are murdered – yet our suicide rates are similar to those of France, Germany and other European countries (and lower than Japan or South Korea). (Greenland experiences a 3 times higher suicide rate than the next country, Suriname).

I’m from Oregon, where a school massacre just took place, and a father of one of the students saw the 16-year-old murderer going into the school carrying a pump-action shotgun, grabbed his pistol out of his car, and shot and killed the assassin (after the teenager had killed 4 people). I’m not recommending packing at all times, but since the incident happened a couple of days ago, I thought I’d mention it.

America is multi-racial and multi-cultural. Can we blame minorities for lacking respect for “whitey’s laws” and turning to crime? I read an article once that followed criminals for several generations. Italian mafioso’s children and grandchildren were likely to achieve like other rich kids: they became doctors and lawyers and went to good universities. Wealthy black criminals saw no such success for their children. Whether this was because of black culture eschewing “white” values, or because of ingrained racism is hard to say.

The American dream is not hard work; it’s the quick score, epitomized by the gold rushes and pioneering hardships our ancestors embraced (although few got rich). The lust for the quick score often leads to criminal activities (which lead to gun-play). Jesse James and John Dillinger were (and still are) American icons. So are gun-toting lawmen like Wyatt Earp.

In the Klondike Gold rush, Skagway, Alaska was the most lawless town extent – but the Canadian side of the pass was relatively law-abiding. In his history of the Gold Rush Pierre Breton credits the Mounted Police, many of whom were well educated younger sons of British aristocrats. Aristocracy is conferred at birth, and the quick score is not so admired where it reigns.

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The pursuit of the almighty dollar.

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Well, that’s part of it. To be more precise, gun violence is not strictly a wealth issue, it is more an issue of access to opportunity and the ability to achieve social mobility.

Like Joshs, I also live in Chicago. I was born and raised there. Let stick with Chicago for a bit.

Take these two zip codes: 60611 and 60624.

The first is a neighborhood called Englewood. The second is the Gold Coast neighborhood. They are physically only 12 mile apart.

Where they are light years away from each other is income and opportunity for social mobility. As you might have surmised, one is 85%-95% black, while the other is 73%-97% white\asian.

I am not attempting to mount a racist eugenics argument, I am merely shining a light on what can best be termed institutional indifference.

Lets stick with Englewood for a moment. From 1930 to 1950 Englewood was approximately 85%-98% white. The retail district at 63rd and Halsted as second only to the Loop downtown. Industry was flourishing, between the stockyards, railroads, steel mills, and manufacturing. This was all within a short commute from Englewood.

But this is not the case today. From 1950 to the current day, over 500,000 jobs either left the south side of Chicago, or just closed outright.

Redlining came next. Redlining is a term derived from the federal agency HOLC’s (Home Owners’ Loan Corporation) determination of financial risk in lending…with D being the “RED”, or “Hazardous” risk territory. Englewood could be deemed a poster child for redlining.

There are other factors and events that solidified Englewood decline. This would become a novel if I kept at it…but I believe this is enough to illustrate the point.

On the other end of the 12 mile span is the Gold Coast. Initially springing from Potter Palmer moving from Prairie Avenue to the north side, it was then, and remains, one of the few HOLC “A” listed, or “Green”, aka “Best” neighborhood to lend to in Chicago.

Where am I going with all of this?

In 60611 your risk of experiencing gun violence is approximately 15.2 incidents per 10,00 people. In 60624 that risk climbs to 333.3 per 10,000 people. A ratio of 22:1.

Sorry for the extended diatribe, but this is a point I hear diminished or ignored frequently.

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It makes sense. Lack of opportunity and racism are big factors. But the worst part is that politicians blame it on those who are the victims of that lack of opportunity.