“Every Country Has Its Problems”
Rodrigo Duterte, former President of the Philippines, at his ICC hearing. Image taken from The Guardian.
Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was recently arrested and sent to the Netherlands to be tried for crimes against humanity during his drug war. Brazilian former President Jair Bolsonaro is indicted for attempting a coup in 2023. And of course, South Korea’s insane few weeks ended with former President Yoon being held accountable.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump is President of the United States again. Let’s talk about why that is.
Whenever I complain about something happening in the United States, it’s very common for well-meaning people to come at me with the following refrain: Every country has its problems. No place is perfect, they say.
Here’s the thing: To a point, I agree with them. There is no perfect country anywhere in the world - even Reddit’s beloved Finland is pretty dark in the winter.
But whenever someone says “every country has its problems” as a way to dismiss the very real atrocities currently occurring in the United States, atrocities that rarely if ever occur elsewhere, I think they’re very wrong indeed. And I’m going to dissect that claim here.
First of all, let’s consider the case of health care. Famously, it costs a fortune here depending on what you need and how greedy your health insurance company is. Consider that a few months ago, the CEO of such a company was assassinated, and much of the country is cheering on the gunman. People are even donating money for his legal defense. This is despite the fact that many Americans live paycheck to paycheck, in no small part due to these health insurance companies.
The United States does not have universal health insurance like essentially every other wealthy nation does. It’s been said before, but all you need to know about the American healthcare system is that there’s a popular TV series in which the main character turns to cooking crystal meth to pay his medical bills. It’s considered some of the best TV ever made, in fact.
Walter White, a TV character who could not exist without the American health care system. Image taken from Wikipedia.
People have always complained about having to pay medical bills, as they should. But this came to a head during the COVID-19 pandemic, which hit the United States especially hard. And again, this was largely due to the country’s lack of universal health insurance. It’s profitable to deny care to people who need it, after all, and people aren’t going to get tested if it costs too much money for them to do so.
More than a million Americans perished from the virus, and you’d think that would make a pretty good case to make healthcare free. (And yes, it’s not actually free, but it’s paid through your taxes in other countries. Same thing.)
Instead, there are still many lawsuits in place to repeal some or all of the Affordable Care Act. And yes, that’s also known as Obamacare, even though a sizable chunk of Americans don’t know that they’re the same thing. But the ACA was barely a band-aid on the gaping bullet wound that is the American healthcare system, and even that could easily be repealed under the new Trump administration.
Speaking of bullets, let’s talk about another crisis plaguing this country - gun violence. The shootings everyone thinks about are the high-profile cases of school violence like Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde…fuck, there are so many. Then there are others that happen in public spaces, including the deadliest of all - the 2017 Las Vegas massacre. Bump stocks were banned after the latter event, but the Supreme Court re-legalized machine guns last year.
What has happened in terms of gun control? Absolutely nothing! And indeed, Sandy Hook was the end of the gun rights debate: If you were going to write a story about an event that would get Americans to finally give up their weapons, you couldn’t do much “better” than Sandy Hook.
This stands in stark contrast to other countries. The United Kingdom banned most firearms after the 1996 Dunblane shooting, and Australia did the same after the Port Arthur Massacre that same year. Canada has had a handful of mass shootings, but here’s the thing - most of those guns come from down here. I’m surprised they weren’t already boycotting us even before Trump!
Make no mistake, people still want gun control. A majority of Americans claim to, in fact. And yet, if anything, firearm laws in this country have become more permissive in the years since twenty first-graders and six staff members were gunned down at Sandy Hook. Couple that with the seventy percent or so of Americans who apparently favor Medicare For All, and you should realize something.
So why is that? If the majority of the population wants things to change, why have they stayed the same?
Well, let’s talk about the United States Constitution. It was written to be very hard to amend - in fact, there has not been a new amendment since 1992.
Because we’re so polarized, and because the bar to ratify a new amendment is so high, it’s my belief that we’ll never see another amendment, no matter how much we might need one. I don’t mean to draw a moral equivalence between the Democrats and Republicans here, but the two parties will never agree on anything significant enough to warrant an amendment ever again.
Some people might wonder why there aren’t any protests. Part of it is the Kyle Rittenhouse precedent - remember how he literally got away with murdering protestors? Then again, I reject the notion that there haven’t been any protests. Remember 2020?
Massive George Floyd protests that ultimately amounted to nothing. Image taken from the Associated Press.
After the most enormous protests in American history, something would need to change regarding police brutality, wouldn’t it? And yet, the most significant legislative response has been to ban discussion of race in classrooms. That’s pretty disgraceful - we’re worse off than we were before the unrest.
Some people say that Europe is more racist than the United States. I’ll admit that I’m a white man, so I’ve never had racism directed at me, but people who claim that the previous sentence is true literally have no idea what they’re talking about.
Let’s talk about Germany, a country that has learned from its past. Symbols related to the Nazis, perpetrators of horrific crimes during the 1930s and 1940s, have been banned in Germany and several other countries. Still, some people say that Europe’s got more racism than America.
I have not spent any significant amount of time in Germany; maybe black people there are more likely to be jeered at, or even called a racial slur. But that’s typically the worst-case scenario in terms of racism in Germany. Nobody fears the police unless they’ve committed a crime.
In America, it’s quite different. Even after the absolutely massive George Floyd protests, over a thousand people are killed by U.S. police every year, and African-Americans are disproportionately targeted. And that’s not the only example; I’ve talked about redlining and its relation to societal apathy in the recent past.
So what’s my point here? How is this related to the saying “every country has its problems?”
Well, it’s simple. Other countries may have problems, but they solve them. Whether it’s Australia passing gun control after one major mass shooting, or France amending their Constitution to enshrine reproductive rights into law, or literally every non-U.S. country committing to fighting the climate crisis, other countries fix problems when they arise.
There’s a reason we can’t be like this too.
Most Americans might want things to change here. But as soon as they’re told that “things changing” will benefit people of color too, they suddenly dig their heels in. Racism runs deeper here than a desire to improve their own lives, and that’s pretty sad.
We are a uniquely sick country, and it’s only going to get worse before it gets better. If it ever gets better. I think it’s more likely that we limp along until we implode under the weight of our archaic stone constitution, which might as well be toilet paper anyway.
