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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.
This is a bit much. America has a huge obesity problem because they stick all these chemicals in their food. While obesity is a better problem to have than malnutrition as in India, it's still a problem.
Australia is like a better version of California. American brands like Starbucks can't compete with our domestic, high-quality artisanal quality coffee. Our food doesn't have nearly as many chemicals in it and people aren't quite so fat. There's no weird tipping culture. Our medical system is better than the NHS (we poach a bunch of British doctors) and more cost-efficient than the US. We have good beaches. There aren't any open-air drug markets and barely any visible homeless (this was a big shock when I was in San Francisco). Public transport is used for transporting the public (even people who wear suits), as opposed to being a moneypit full of undesirables. Very low crime generally. Plus we have resource rents to subsidize the rest of our economy because our population/land value ratio is very generous. Our national debt is half that of the US and we had a surplus this year. Taxes are roughly equivalent to the US, well below European standards.
On the down side, there's a cancerous compulsory superannuation scheme that siphons off 9% (and rising) of worker income so big finance can squander it and charge fees on it. You can manage your own superannuation if you fill out a metric tonne of paperwork. Our technology sector isn't as advanced as the US, though we do pretty well in quantum computing and materials science. Wages are somewhat lower than the US, though property is fairly expensive (likely due to how desirable this country is). People don't work as hard as in the US either, so it's somewhat balanced. No guns and a mildly more authoritarian government. It gets quite hot in summer but we can afford air conditioning.
Broadly speaking, I'd put Australia just ahead of the US or UK, having been to all three.
I can just not eat the junk right? I'm not making promises, but you can trust me when I say that I keep my weight within a mostly respectable range while having a rather degenerate diet.
If not, well, ozempic is a thing.
America has incredibly diversity in its cuisine, you can find food from pretty much any country in the world with a little bit of effort.
I can only assume you take this for granted, because finding French, Greek, Persian and African food where I live is impossible as far as I know it.
I'm aware that the discrepancy is not as glaring when you compare it to the UK.
I like Australia too, but the same ECFMG issue that makes only the UK an option for current me applies there too.
And in Canada and New Zealand.
All of them are lazy enough to thrust the issue of verifying medical qualifications to EPIC, an aspect of the ECFMG, as well as an additional sponsorship note from the same that my med school lacks. (This is not a legal requirement in India, only something so common everyone takes it for granted)
Whereas the UK only uses the ECFMG to make sure my degree is real and recognized by my nation. They rely on a professional licensing exam, the PLAB, to make sure you know the right way to hold a stetho.
I'd happily go to Australia, as many NHS doctors are already doing!
Here in America, people have often cited this point as a foreshadowing of why America is in decline. And the meme often goes something like this, "America is no longer a homeland. It is a marketplace." And increasingly this has become an operative principle sewing discontent in Canada, the last number of years as well. It's difficult for me to see how this is a quality instrument for measuring social health. Sure, maybe Muslims will occasionally help themselves to some Panda Express. But they're certainly not going to celebrate Christmas. And they're certainly not going to attend the gay parade, at least without a truck full of explosives.
Lots of Muslims in the USA probably do celebrate Christmas, to one degree or another.
I'm curious what you would consider American "homeland" food. Nearly all of the distinctly American food I can think of is either hyper-local dishes or the result of a fusion of various European, black, and native cuisine.
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