Michael Waterhouse

🇦🇺 🇺🇸 An Australian woman has a rather devastating response to Americans who insist that everyone loves the United States and secretly dreams of living there. “Australians aren’t jealous of America, we mostly feel sorry for you.” She also makes a much more interesting point. Believing that you already live in the greatest country on Earth is intellectually lazy. If you’ve been told your entire life that nowhere else comes close, why bother looking? And that is precisely what makes this mentality so limiting. Looking beyond your own borders should be a source of inspiration. Other countries do things better. Some have better healthcare, others better education, infrastructure or social protections. There is absolutely nothing unpatriotic about noticing this and asking why your own country cannot do the same. Every country has its problems. Australia does. Norway does. America certainly does. Nobody has invented the perfect society. But every country also has something worth learning from. And perhaps that is the greatest irony of all. The people most convinced that America has nothing to learn from the rest of the world may be the very people preventing it from becoming better.