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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.
America is better for the middle class (and for doctors), but I’d rather be rich in London than be rich anywhere else in the world (and so, seemingly, would quite a lot of people). Your view of the states isn’t wrong, but it’s not really right either. Even on your theoretical $500k joint income, you might find you’d be less wealthy than you imagine, I’ll put it that way.
And Brits aren’t “too poor” to afford air conditioning, it just hasn’t been hot enough for more than 10-15 years in the summer to warrant it. A/C is cheap to install in the brick terraces in which most average Brits live; average citizens of many much poorer southern European countries have it. It’s just not a huge thing here yet. If you live in a very expensive $10m listed townhouse in central London it’s harder to install (although still completely possible, many people I know have it), but you wouldn’t live in one of those for a while.
America is a great place, and average people have more material wealth in the US than pretty much anywhere else in the world, but they don’t seem (in my experience) much happier or more satisfied than their British or European peers. You have bought into the dream that the reality might or might not live up to. I will stay in ‘declining’ Britain for as long as the next Labour government don’t go full retard (I have low expectations, don’t worry). We shall see how long that takes, if it happens.
What’s your specialty? You can make a few hundred thousand a year as a consultant in London, provided you’re in something in-demand for private work. I wouldn’t expect a life of poverty as a British doctor.
It's worth pointing out that this isn't just a non-American thing, either. I grew up in the South, where air conditioning is a precondition of living a tolerable life, and you would have to be desperately poor not to have central air. When I later moved to a college town in the Upper Midwest, it took me a while to figure out that window mounted air conditioning units wasn't a sign of dire poverty where I had moved to; rather, the summers were mild enough that people often would only want air conditioning for a few weeks every year, and if they lived in older, well-built houses, the pain and cost of upgrading to central air wasn't mostly worth the trouble for them, and a few window mounted units were fine. This was all counterbalanced by the much more drastic (and expensive in time and attention) measures they would have to take to mitigate absolutely brutal winters, of course.
Central air conditioning is a rarety in India, and I haven't seen any but the very upper class opt for it in their homes. We usually just air-condition the rooms we spend the most time with and grit through the rest.
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Of course, in actually cold areas, you don’t need to take punitive special measures to keep the houses warm, since all housing is constructed to keep the warmth in as a matter of course.
Here's Finland compared to Wisconsin (where I lived): https://www.crownscience.org/places/finland/wisconsin-us
And Finland compared to Minnesota: https://www.crownscience.org/places/finland/minnesota-us
And Finland compared to North Dakota: https://www.crownscience.org/places/finland/north-dakota-us
In general, the Upper Midwest is physically far from any large bodies of water (i.e. oceans) that would moderate its temperature, and the plains up north through Canada don't have any significant mountains to dampen artic winds. It's a legitimately cold part of the world, at least for how populated it is (Minneapolis metro area is something like 3.7 million people).
There's a reason that historically Wisconsin and Minnesota had a disproportionate amount of early immigration from Sweden and Norway.
OK, I stand corrected.
How did you not know that the midwest is next to... Canada.
Because it's still to the south of Canada. Finland is on the same latitude as Alaska, and even knowing the Gulf Stream warming effect etc., my automatic assumption for all of the 48 states (and Hawaii, of course) is that they're automatically warmer than Finland.
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I always used to think the Mid West had to be the geographical center of America. I mean, that's what the name most suggests to me, before I first checked a map.
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Large parts of the upper Midwest get actually brutally cold in the winter- the dakotas in particular.
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