America. The world’s freest and best country?

Hello!

If you’ve never read my blog before, welcome. I’m an American, I have lived in a small town in Massachusetts my entire life. This post is essentially a rank backed up with facts about what people tend to believe: That America is the “Freest and best country in the world”. I will say this outright. It absolutely isn’t.

The United states is a country that lies in the North American continent and takes up most of that area. It was declared a free country in 1776 and recognized as one in 1783.

Through the years, much of the world has looked at us an an example, many people immigrate here for a better life, better education, amongst other things. We are also a very nationalistic nation. We wave flags outside our doorstep, and there’s one everywhere you look. In France, a French flag denotes a post office or other govt. building. This is really only an example of what we do here. We wear American themed hats, have bumper stickers that express our positive feelings towards our nation.

You may love this country, you may hate it, or you could simply be neutral about it. Not all of you reading this may be American, you could be from anywhere, reading this very post. Me, I dislike this country. But who cares about my opinion eh? Lets get down to more facts, because lets be honest, reading a blog post about an American who dislikes his country and listing all the reasons why is boring and makes the poster look like an uneducated man who lives in a hole.

I’m going to compare the country I’m living in to other countries around the globe in many areas: Education, Happiness, Culture, and General Stability.

Education:
Literacy subsection:

In my book, literacy is very important. It also makes a big impact when comparing countries. If you’re illiterate, chances are, you won’t live a great life until you learn to read, you are NOT reading this post, and you may be living on the street.

So let’s look at America’s super high ranking in literacy!
Oh, would you look here, we’re ranked 45th. Well, gee, that’s depressing. We have a 99.0% literacy rate when rounded to the tenth decimal place. So just a little under 99%. Overall, that’s good. Here, kids get mandated education, which goes from Kindergarten to 12th grade. Powered by tax money. I see nothing really bad there. A 99% literacy rate is pretty good in my book.
Source: http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_2009_EN_Complete.pdf

Now how about General scores of reading, math, and science?:
Well, according to the below article. In reading, we’re 14th. Not bad right? Okay, how about math? Nothing America couldn’t conquer, right? We’re 25th. Oh, well at least we aren’t dead last. And finally science. We’re 17th. So, not the best, but not the worst.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/dec/07/world-education-rankings-maths-science-reading

I hope, at the very least, that nationalistic hat that some of you wear is taken off now.

So what’s next? That would be….

Happiness:

Being a free country, where one can do anything he or she wants; we obviously would rank near first in happiness.

Well, America is ranked at 114 in 2009, according to the HPI or ‘Happy Planet Index’. You can find that in the source. There are many factors that go into the HPI, It’s explained here: http://www.happyplanetindex.org/learn/calculating/ .

Source: http://www.happyplanetindex.org/public-data/files/happy-planet-index-2-0.pdf

Culture:
When I think of “America”, my thoughts are usually a very different view than most, so I won’t go into that. But generally when we think of America’s culture, we think of movie stars and such. The whole world seems to love it too. But culturally, what’s unique to America?

Well, most people would agree here. America is a melting pot of many different people with different backgrounds and roots from all over the world. You’ll find a different feel to wherever you go here. But aside from daily rituals and a few holidays (ex. Thanksgiving, Columbus day), I find that there really isn’t much that’s unique to America. We really don’t HAVE a central culture, much less a unique one.

General Stability:

So, how stable are we? Economically, we faced a huge economic blunder because of how the housing market worked. Many banks essentially signed over mortgages to people who would not be able to pay them back. This caused a recession, as of now, we’re near 10% unemployment, that includes me too. Surely our govt. did something about this right? Well, I believe the Obama administration DID try to do just that, it’s just that it’s such a huge mess, he wasn’t able to pick all of it up, he was essentially handed the keys to presidency, plus a mop and broom.

Now, of course we can still count on congress to help out right? They had just recently passed a bill that declared Pizza a Vegetable because of the amount of tomato sauce on it. Which is funny, not only because pizza is not a vegetable, but also because a tomato is a fruit. And of course we have our beloved free speech right? The thing that was promised to us in our constitution? Well, that’ll soon be censored when the PROTECT IP bill passes, and bill S.978 you’ll be put in jail for 5 years and have a felony on your record when you stream your favorite video game. How wonderful!

Is America the best and freest country in the world? Absolutely not. From what I’ve heard, that’s Norway right now. It’s a good thing those bills haven’t passed yet, otherwise, you wouldn’t be reading any of this.

- Dragos240

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