Watch Out!

As much as I love liv­ing in Amer­ica, I must admit some aspects of life can be quite annoy­ing. I think prospec­tive immi­grants should be given the whole pic­ture and I don’t believe wear­ing pink-colored glasses really helps on the long run.

This is not about bash­ing Canada or North Amer­ica, or say­ing that other coun­tries on earth are by com­par­i­son much bet­ter. This is about giv­ing some other facts, for once a bit on the “minus” side.

So here my list of what I con­sider are “unpleas­ant real­i­ties of Amer­i­can life”.

Polit­i­cal apa­thy: peo­ple are pretty cyn­i­cal about pol­i­tics and many don’t bother to vote. In the United States, approx­i­mately 55% of the eli­gi­ble pop­u­la­tion reg­is­ters to vote, in Canada, it’s 76%. Pretty low com­pared to Europe, for exam­ple… There aren’t a lot of par­ties either: in the USA, it’s basi­cally between Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans, and in Canada between the Lib­er­als, the Con­ser­v­a­tives and maybe the Bloc. I rarely see or hear peo­ple argu­ing about pol­i­tics: let’s face it, the rise of Obama and the atmos­phere dur­ing the last pres­i­den­tial elec­tions in the U.S.A was pretty exceptional!

Reli­gion is every­where: it’s hard being an athe­ist or an agnos­tic in North Amer­ica. Peo­ple take faith very seri­ously: 73% of Amer­i­cans say that they believed in a God and in Canada, only 16% report hav­ing no reli­gious affil­i­a­tion. If you are just a casual athe­ist, like I am, you will soon learn to not debate with peo­ple and to keep your lack of faith to your­self. Activist athe­ists will face a much big­ger chal­lenge, since reli­gion and beliefs are deeply rooted here. Big­ger headaches too, as they will real­ize that the sep­a­ra­tion between the church and the state in blurred at best! In smaller com­mu­ni­ties, going to church may be the only way to “fit in”. Euro­peans may also be sur­prised to notice that what are con­sid­ered as “cult” there are very pop­u­lar reli­gions on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Dri­ving is a way of life: cities are usu­ally far apart, spread out and most peo­ple get around by dri­ving. Only big­ger cities have effi­cient pub­lic trans­porta­tion and the city plan­ning is usu­ally made in favor of dri­vers. Sim­ply put, tak­ing pub­lic trans­porta­tion is sim­ply not prac­ti­cal a lot of times. There­for, it is pretty com­mon for a house­hold to have two cars or more… Walk­ing is often seen as an activ­ity that need to be planned, not some­thing you do to get from point A to point B. Sim­i­larly, peo­ple would drive to the gym, exer­cise for an hour, and then drive back home…

Buy or die: con­sum­ing and buy­ing are seen as some­thing very pos­i­tive that helps the econ­omy. The more, the bet­ter. You can shop pretty much any time since stores open late and don’t usu­ally close on Sun­day. And if, excep­tion­ally, stores are closed… don’t worry, there is always the inter­net! There are always sales going on and any major hol­i­days or event is over-marketed months ahead. To give you an idea, we are in July and I saw the first “back to school” sales at Wal Mart! Hal­loween sales start as soon as mid-September, Christ­mas mer­chan­dises are sold right after Hal­loween etc.

Whose debt? A lot of empha­sis is put on liv­ing beyond your means. Amer­i­cans carry the most credit cards, with an aver­age of 4 cards per per­son. You are always encour­age to get your­self in debt: from credit cards com­pa­nies send­ing you appli­ca­tions with ridicu­lous credit limit (I’m talk­ing ten of thou­sands here) to the “buy now pay later” scheme in stores. Being in debt seem to be a fact of life here and most peo­ple are quite casual about it. Iron­i­cally, you do need to have credit cards to build your credit his­tory, in order to be able to get a mort­gage later on.

The power of mar­ket­ing: there is an insane num­ber of com­mer­cials on TV and adver­tis­ing in gen­eral every­where. Pub­lic space is clut­tered with bill­boards and I have to skim through the news­pa­per to find the gen­uine arti­cles among all the crap. Movies start 15 min­utes late because of the adver­tis­ing… there are even ads on garbage can and on pub­lic bathroom’s doors! I’m tired of retriev­ing fly­ers in my mail­box and to walk home just to find more in a small plas­tic bag hung at the door­knob. I hate adversing.

Eat, eat, eat: all in all, food is pretty unhealthy. Por­tions, for a start, are huge. Junk food is incred­i­bly cheap and con­ve­nient: there is a fast food at every cor­ner! Peo­ple eat just about any­time and any­where: watch­ing a movie at the the­ater, doing a meet­ing, dri­ving, being in the bus… And I find most North Amer­i­cans don’t have a healthy rela­tion­ship with food any­way, from eat­ing the wrong foods too often to ban­ning some food groups alto­gether as a way to diet, from binge eat­ing and exer­cis­ing to exor­cise heavy meals to eat­ing too much too often.

Have fun!: North Amer­i­cans value “enter­tain­ment”: work hard, play hard. Movies, music, sports, every­thing is big­ger, fun­nier and bet­ter. It does get a bit annoy­ing though, because every­thing is very short-term and quite super­fi­cial. You will hear about a movie for months before its release date for exam­ple, only to see it last for two weeks at the the­ater. Some­body is the biggest star one day and a total loser the next.Consistency, peo­ple…

Media Hys­te­ria: medias are very pow­er­ful and they take their role seri­ously. It’s not so much the media biais that dri­ves me crazy, but rather this weird twisted way of exag­ger­at­ing every sin­gle event. Mick­ael Jack­son died? We had 24/7 footage about the news, includ­ing the video of Jackson’s Body being flown from the hos­pi­tal to the coroner’s office (with close-ups). Demon­stra­tion in Iran? No deep cov­er­age of his­tor­i­cal issues etc. but the same footage of blurry demon­stra­tions all over again. Less pic­tures, more talk, people!

How about you? What dri­ves you crazy?

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3. 8 North Amer­i­can Social Events and Tra­di­tions You May Not Know
4. Coupon­ing, a North Amer­i­can “Sport”
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