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On a Zoom with friends tonight, we briefly discussed something really interesting -- that the U.S. was always going to handle COVID way worse than Europe, no matter who's in the Oval Office, because government-imposed inconveniences are already a way of life in most of Europe.
My U.S. expat friends around Europe bring up all manner of stuff from restricted business hours to government-mandated trash disposal bags (!) that your average American would never put up with except in very rural communities. People there are used to it; we aren't.
On a similar note, NYC didn't get COVID under control due to good leadership (uh, DeBlasio?) But NYC has a strong mind-your-own-business code of etiquette that you don't see in most of the U.S.; lots of norms around respecting others' space and time due to close quarters.
Also if you read books like @WoodardColin's "American Nations," you learn there are deep ideological nuances between chunks of the U.S. that aren't always evident on the surface, and it's like -- getting us unified around ANYTHING is gonna be the exception, not the norm
And frankly a lot of this is why a lot of Americans would never want to live elsewhere. I could go into this more, and maybe @mattjpfmcdonald will convince me to, but right now the panther's asleep on my feet, the frogs and crickets are singing outside, and -- goodnight, Twitter.
