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Apologetics for America
I'm a big fan of the United States. It's a big country. It's a safe country. The people are wealthy, kind, industrious, and have done more than their fair share of upholding the Pax Americana under which the majority of the world prospers, including those who would tear it down.
I would go so far as to say that I'd be significantly happier if I had been so lucky as to have been born in a counterfactual universe where my parents had emigrated there, even keeping all my myriad flaws like ADHD and depression.
It's a country that holds multitudes, and has had such a good track record of making good on its promise of embodying:
And then achieving the minor miracle of making the vast majority of them upstanding proud Americans regardless of caste and creed.
(To such an extent that it has lost the memetic immune system needed to assimilate some of the people who meet that criteria but are resilient to anything but force)
It is gorgeous. Even after the visiting the UK, a nation that even in its sclerosed and ailing state is significantly better than India, I found myself grossly disappointed at how small and dull the place was, compared to what I've seen of the States.
I count myself lucky to still have the memories of when I visited as a toddler, some of my earliest, a period I enjoyed so much that I came back home speaking English with an American accent when I hadn't even been conversant in the language when I left.
I stare at the reels and pictures posted on Insta by my friends studying there with ill-concealed envy. It looks so huge, so clean, so vibrant, so picturesque and unspoiled. Still a land where someone with innate talent, having landed with but a penny to his name, can ennoble himself through hard work, or at the very least his descendants.
If it were not for the fact that I'm currently ineligible to give the USMLE today, for no fault of my own, I'd bid adieu to my current aspirations for practising and settling in the UK. The latter is still better than India, but do you really need me to tell you how low a bar that is to beat?
I'm about as pro-American as it gets without driving a pickup truck with the stars-and-stripes hanging off it!
The people eat great food. They live in huge houses that appear outright intimidating to the rest of us. They can afford to waste gigaliters of water on a modestly appealing perennial grass and mostly not begrudge the expense.
They can travel visa free to most of the world, and act the fool there (can, not necessarily do, the worst I can say about most American tourists I've met is that they were rather underinformed about where they'd ended up), content in the knowledge that none but utter pariah states would dare raise a hand at them out of fear of Uncle Sam.
They earn salaries that make us all look like paupers. The median wage for a doctor in the US is $250k, fresh out of residency, whereas a senior consultant in the UK might be content to make half that. Indian doctors can only weep, especially lowly ones like me. Even my father, so talented in his surgical field that he'd be nationally famous if he was more fluent in English (instead just being regionally famous), makes only $50k PA at the very peak of his career, after a life of suffering and hustling so his sons would have to suffer and hustle just a bit less.
Even that seemingly colossal sum of money does not achieve the QOL a naive purchasing power calculation would suggest. Even billionaires here must be content to have their money only buy quick trips with their windows rolled up from only upper class enclave to the next.
The world, somewhat more multipolar than it once was, still wobbles unsteadily if you try and make it rotate around an axis not centered on America.
I'd give a lot to be there. I really would.
That is why it so severely vexes me that my girlfriend, a smart, intelligent and hard working woman who makes for an enviable partner to have at my side, holds a view of it so jaundiced you don't know whether to cry or laugh.
Like many Americans, she has had her perception of the States clouded by sheer propaganda that is more interested in cherrypicking out all of America's real problems, and when even all the real ones no longer suffice, concoct ones out of half-truths and whole-cloth to terrorize a broken primate brain that only notices the bad and becomes inured to the good, such that it no longer bears a resemblance to how fucking good they have it.
She stares at me like I'm mad when I tell her I've always wanted to live there, and the few warts on the face of the nation can't hide its timeless beauty.
She believes that abortion has been banned. When I protest otherwise and say that it's only a few states putting restrictions on it, and even then, just a few, she shakes in existential terror at the idea that there's a seething crowd coming for the rights of women, eager to snatch them all away. She thinks racism is a serious concern for hardworking and talented immigrants who speak fluent English, whereas you could put me in a room with a Confederate flag and I'd find a way to end up drinking beers and shooting AR-15s before dawn.
Did I mention she's terrified of gun violence, even if she could live a dozen lives in parallel and not get shot?
She categorically refuses to follow me if I wistfully make plans to find some route to make it there, be it fighting tooth and nail with my med school and the ECFMG to give me the right to at least try my luck, so that I can show them I meet even their high standards.
I'm at the point that I am seriously debating abandoning clinical medicine as a career, to upskill myself in medical ML, so that I have an easier route to the States that isn't gated behind a professional licensing exam I'm not allowed to give. I am still young. I am allowed to dream.
She's rather be middle class in the UK, unable to afford air-conditioning, living in a tiny house, watching our salaries erode into nothingness, and then, if Sunak successfully makes doctors into a thin wrapper for GPT-5, potentially resign ourselves to a life of mediocrity, or worse, come back to India with our tails between our legs where we'd have to settle for working shit jobs with longer hours and worse pay.
She's scared of paying the medical bills, when the kind of comprehensive coverage that two professionals making 500k together buys care beyond the dreams of the NHS. Perhaps not value for money, but value.
I criticize America all the time, but only because I love it. I want to gorge myself on cheeseburgers with ridiculous portion sizes, because even if I die fat, I die happy.
I cherish what the Founding Fathers built, a shining city built on a hill of negentropy and abundance, rising out of a swamp wherein dwell the majority of us, only a generation or two removed from near-Malthusian conditions. I would die to keep the barbarians away from the gates, if only because I want to cross them myself, as an esteemed guest if nothing else, hopefully to be one of their own.
I set out to write a post somewhat glorifying (fairly) America, and to invite others to submit arguments that would let my girlfriend see reason. It would seem I've inadvertently done all the heavy lifting, if not for the fact that I've marshaled all these arguments before her and still found them wanting.
I don't want to jump to the conclusion that the two of us are moral mutants who can never reconcile our preferences. I prefer to think that she's wrong about her fears, or weighs the wrong facts too heavily and the right ones not at all.
Help me convince her. I will find it hard to live with myself if I fail.
Oh, and Happy Fourth of July to you all, ye sons and daughters living several decades in the future, hailing from the nation from whose physical and mental toil most of the good things in the world come.
Wait, is it a bit late for that? Um, I blame timezones, pernicious and insidious things that they are.
Don't think I don't see the cracks in the pristine facade, the erosion of the meritocracy that made your country glorious. I simply think that if America wakes up and patches a few holes, it can earn the right to slumber again in peace for centuries hence.
Tell her you want to move to a leftist state like Massachusetts or California that has similar laws to Europe. Tell her that America is so big thinking all American states are the same would be like an American thinking there is no real difference between living in Romania or England or an American being fearful of living in Spain because of the policies of the Hungarian government.
There's no problem with appreciating and even loving the society you live/grew up in, without needing to fetishize it all the time. To some people like the OP, that may be what "America" means to him. To other people, it's meant something quite different. It's just a matter of who benefits.
I grew up with a material quality of life that's probably comparable to the average American that isn't wealthy and didn't live in poverty, which is to say well, but had it horrible in almost every other measurable dimension. That isn't a reason to love America though. That's just running away from the horrors of a life without modern technology and conveniences. Nobody would prefer to go back to more primitive times, and that's equally true if you were living in 1700's compared with the 700's (yes not every historical period applies, I get it, the Dark Ages were really a thing). Certainly didn't have a great home life. Certainly didn't have a great educational environment. Certainly didn't grow up in a good neighborhood. I don't think that's a great way to measure the intangible wealth and overall health of a society though.
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That's a good argument, I've tried making a similar one in the past, but she'd trust it more from a native.
India is no slouch when it comes to size, but even it is dwarfed by America.
So you want a leftist state AND biryani? I got bad news for you, dude, your dream home is in Newark, New Jersey.
I am warning you, if I go to the trouble of visiting and find out that the biryani there is the same abomination I found in the UK, I'm going to cry and shit my pants.
I can't assure you that f3zinker isn't right, having never been to India. But while you can find the UK stuff, you're probably smart enough to avoid places like "Brick Lane Curry House", so it will definitely be better than that.
(And a correction, it's Newark Avenue in Jersey City, not the city of Newark)
The UK is the same. “British Indian” food was created by Bangladeshi immigrants to appeal to the British palate. It can be excellent, but it’s its own cuisine, it’s like Tex Mex or Italian-American cuisine of the “red sauce” variety.
London has some of the best Indian fine dining in the world, my favorite is a place called Bibi but there are also a bunch of great examples, especially when it comes to North Indian cuisine. It’s so weird to see international culinary snobs complain about a £9 “Tikka Masala” from the “Brick Lane Curry House” as if it’s an indictment against all Indian cuisine in Britain. America has some of the world’s best Italian cuisine but you won’t find it at Olive Garden.
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Sorry to say this, but as a Desi who visited and ate Desi foods in some Desi strongholds in the East Coast of the US like various parts of New Jersey. You will be disappointed. A lot.
But on the other hand, they have BBQ, Chinese, Italian, Mexican !!, and just about everything else. So you wouldn't really miss good food all that much.
I always thought you were a Turk or Central Asian or something!
I don't recall saying anything that would suggest I live in Turkey or.. Kazakhstan for that matter.
I usually don't speak about my ethnicity/nationality unlike @self_made_human because I don't live in the shithole so their matters; let that be political, cultural or otherwise are more or less irrelevant to me. I'm a worse Desi than him, I'm illiterate in my mother tongue! I've grown up elsewhere.
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I'm sufficiently irony poisoned that if hear someone tell me "Ayy, I'm walkin' here" in an Italian accent I'd just keel over and die.
That or my heart failing from my biryani diet. I've eaten more of it than 5 average people combined. This is actually not a joke!
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His girlfriend's dream home is in a college town.
I was thinking Ithaca, NY might be a good fit for both.
If they can deal with the weather there.
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