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Since this wasn't limited to non-Americans...
First some negatives:
We don't take criticism. We complain that we're going down the tubes while we find clever ways to dodge taxes. We're myopic. What happens in the rest of the world is one huge opaque mystery to most of us. We're monolingual. We take too many things at face value such as what the media and politicians of our persuasion say. Most of us don't know our own history. We're hedonists with little regard for others. We're selfish, sneaky, self-centered, and greedy. We don't have a social safety net nor national health care, but we're more upset about our tax rates, which are very low on a global scale. We can't take care of ourselves financially. We try to live lives like movies and television. We want to fence ourselves off from the rest of the world at the same time that we try to conquer it. We don't have an intellectual culture. We instead have an infantile knee-jerk reaction bottom-line culture. We're push-overs to authority and greed. We're hopelessly polarized.
And some positives:
We can build strong communities. We feel united. We're diverse from coast to coast. We're proud of our country's great accomplishments. We try to trust one another even when we have no reason to do so. We work hard. We get through crises together with friends and family. We have a rich history. We have an enormous country that most Americans won't see half of in their lives. We sacrifice when called to do so.
Yes, I know what you're thinking: I listed many more negatives than positives. I'm not entirely happy with what my country has become recently. I like to think I'm a moderate and I hope we return to moderation again soon. What will it take to restore balance? We keep going from left to right to left to right and now we're extremely far right. Here, people on either side (we only have two sides here, Republican and Democrat) become so polarized that they can't see anything good about the other side. Sports and politics have merged: we have teams and each team sees the other team as a loser. That's bad for everyone. We need to quiet the extremists and get back to the center somehow. I hope we can.
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