sorry to be salty in your inbox, ignore if you want. but europeans going “durr durr YOU elected trump” when i was 14, making it seem like 1 person is the sole cause of all US Bad, made me so mad. like, i get that nordic countries have better standards of living because of universal healthcare and gun control, but let’s not pretend the reason they have less racism isn’t because they wiped all poc out. they use the us as a scapegoat for all societal problems tbh and it gets annoying.

Okay first of all, you were 14 in 2016??? I'm so old and therefore I'm now designating myself your honorary Internet big sister lol.

But yeah, I'm pretty sick and tired of people celebrating Nordic (or Scandinavian because apparently there's a difference between those two terms lol) countries as paragons of virtue in every way when like, their entire country's population is like half of Ohio's so clearly it's a lot more difficult to govern the United States and its 50 states (+ territories) than it is to govern like, Denmark. It's also a matter of size too like the western United States is geographically huge; it takes about 5 hours to drive across Washington state and we aren't even the biggest state out here. Meanwhile, you can be in three different countries in that time in parts of Europe.

Some of what's wrong with America is because of American ethos and individualism or whatever but we need to stop pretending that any other country on earth comes close to being as large and heterogeneous as the US except maybe Brazil, which like, is worse in pretty much every way than the United States so really isn't a comparison. Also like, we voted out our fascist strongman and he's now languishing in Florida getting honorary black belts, Bolsonaro may very well get reelected and even if he doesn't, Brazil doesn't have a Joe Biden in the wings.

Also like, the USA is literally the most racially diverse country on earth!! Asian countries and African countries are much more racially and religiously homogeneous. For instance, Muslims make up almost 20% of the population in India and we never hear about anti-Muslim bigotry in India because the other 80% is all Hindu and silences a lot of the discussions. Meanwhile, the percentage of Black people in the US is less than 15% but racism is still a major topic of discussion here since in addition to Black people, there are Asians and Latinos and Native Americans and Jewish people, and even groups like the Irish and Italians who were previously othered when they first immigrated but are now white.

Americans of all races and origins have long formed coalitions with other groups unlike their own, and they worked together to bring about a better future for everybody, and it literally dismisses all their hard work over the centuries to ceaselessly whinge about how this 330 million strong country is unable to instantaneously do what some country a quarter of the size of Florida was able to do. Just for one example, the Black-Jewish alliance in the American South was key in bringing about Civil Rights in the 1960s and even in 2021, the modern version of the Black-Jewish alliance elected senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in Georgia, a literal bastion of the Confederacy. And that should be celebrated!!

The point is, America very much is a melting pot, and that makes it difficult to bring about national structural change but that doesn't mean it's not worth fighting for.