Yeah I lived, worked or visited there at various times and the people I met were great and I made many good friendships. It is a great place and I had some fantastic times while I was there but in your peripheral vision there was always another America. It was an America that I was not part of and it is dark and unforgiving. It is an America of the have nots and to live there is to be an outsider in your own country.
How can a country that has so much be so blind and uncaring to large swathes of it's own people? It is so hard to reconcile the differences between people you meet, who for the most part are good and kind, with the brutal nature of the society they are part of. The absolute fallacy that is the American dream goes someway to explaining the division that exists in American society. What we are seeing now is the culmination of that dream with this president. All I now see is a scramble to the top of the pile and it does not matter who you have to stand on to get there. This notion that if you work hard work enough all good things will come to you is the biggest alternative fact yet.
Entirely agreed. The people are extremely like to be warm, caring and kind - the society is a constant struggle between those who want to soften its hard edges and those who unthinkingly adhere to the ruthless dog-eat-dog nature of capitalism, the atomisation of individuals and the death of any societal ideals beyond the preservation of individual liberty (including the liberty to starve to death or die of disease and want) at the cost of any sense of common good.
Mind, the UK isn't immune to falling to these sorts of anti-social tendencies - it happened in the 80's, and has arguably been happening since. 'I've got mine, Jack' is becoming increasingly prevalent in the UK as well, and the idea of the common good (with all that it entails - the NHS, the welfare state, the social security system) is being steadily eroded by the rightward shift in British politics. But I agree that the United States is unparalleled in that regard.
However, I advocated visiting the U.S as a tourist. As a tourist, you're not exposed to the worst excesses of the United States - you are only likely to see people as they are, not as they appear to be within larger societal concerns. And the people there are in the main good, kind and decent folk. That peripheral vision you reference undoubtedly exists, and will present itself to you if you stay long enough - but, as
@Danishfurniturelover points out, that ugly peripheral vision of what societies are truly like for many people living within them is present elsewhere as well. China, India, Russia, France, Germany, the UK, Canada....wait long enough and the brutal or otherwise ugly sides of those countries expose themselves to you.
You have to reconcile yourself to that, and see the country for what it fundamentally is, while hoping that the darker natures of those places can be changed in the course of time. After all, society is made by humans, and we are an endlessly adaptable species.
