I recently was involved in a conversation which criticized the way something was done. I didn’t start the conversation, but when I enthusiastically joined in, I was asked, directly, why I had sought US citizenship if I don’t think the US is great.

And, if I am honest, that hurt.

Nowhere is perfect. I could write a list about every country or community that I know much about, of things that that community gets wrong, in my opinion. And sometimes, it’s not an opinion. There are statistics that show, for example, that the UK has poor healthcare outcomes compared with other developed countries (except the US, which always comes last). And the UK’s crime figures are not as good as, say, Norway, (but again way better than the US).

Criticizing how a country does something is a part and parcel of living in a democracy. If everything was perfect, then there would be little need for politicians or politics. Let’s just keep everything exactly as it is, because we’ve done it. We’ve made the cup of coffee in Elf.

We’re still learning.

But that’s not how things are: Society learns new things all the time. In fact, the rate at which we are learning is continually increasing. In 1900, we doubled human knowledge every 100 years, and now we double what we know every 13 months.

With the new things we know, we should be making changes to our society. The trouble with Make America Great Again is that it implies things were ever better than they are now. Not only is that false (aside from likely temporary degradations like the recent drop in life expectancy, and the success of the US Supreme Court in harming women’s healthcare), but it’s dangerous to pretend it’s true.

Things are better.

In recent years we have allowed all American adults to get married, regardless of the gender of the person they love. Crime has reduced, continually. Pollution has reduced. In recent years, we have started the process of repairing bridges that collapse at an alarming rate, killing people. We have made great progress in equalizing women and men, though more needs to be done to increase women’s wages, for example. George Bush Sr. apologized, rightly, for the imprisonment of Japanese Americans based solely on their ethnicity, The Civil Rights Act was passed, women were allowed the vote, slavery was abolished, and women were allowed to own property.

At any time in the past, the US was a worse place to live for anyone but rich white men. The only people who look back on the past and think, “things were better then” are either unaware of the progress we have made, or wish to reverse the Civil Rights Act, or the Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage, or any number of other fact-based changes that have improved life for citizens and non-citizens alike.

If I look around at the US today and wish:

• that we had legislation that protected poor (or average people, actually), from the healthcare system should they get sick;
• that we could legislate in ways that will stop mass shootings;
• that we could legislate to protect the rights of atheists, homosexuals, transexuals, and anyone else that conservatives don’t know how to love;
• that we could reduce crime rates and demilitarize the police;
• that we could work to increase the availability of housing at reasonable prices;
• that we could work to increase the equity in education outcomes;
• that we were working to break up oligopolies and monopolies;
• that our tax system wasn’t skewed to the benefit of the rich, at the detriment of the poor and disabled;
• that we had legislation to protect the truth from free speech (e.g., Fox ‘News’ and the lies they tell that damage our democracy);
• etc. etc.

… none of that should mean that I don’t think the US is a great country, or that it doesn’t have great potential.

And if people wish that things could be improved, that doesn’t mean there’s this mythical utopia that those same people could move to, even if we didn’t have regressive immigration policies in almost every country.

We all have to live somewhere, and in democracies, at least, we should all be working to make them work better for everyone. If you disagree, disagree on the basis of facts, don’t suggest that people should “go home” or other anti-immigrant or racist things. It’s just not nice.

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I write short stories and oþer fiction – check þem out at shortbooks.online

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