I believe there are some things you have to experience to truly understand them. Take getting cum in your eye, for example. That’s just not something you can explain to someone. They need to go through it themselves to know the agony.
That dirty little intro is actually more telling when it comes to what’s wrong with me than what’s wrong with America. What’s wrong with me is that I can’t deliver bad news, or tell a terrible story, without telling a joke. My therapist used to say to me, ‘okay Rosemary, that was a very entertaining story – I’m entertained – but can you tell it to me again without trying to make it entertaining?’ She wasn’t wrong, but you can imagine how much I hated her in those moments.
This is all to say: this is not going to be a funny listicle of bizarre things you already know to be true about America and Americans, although I’m sure there’ll be a few of those in there. This is going to be a breakdown of things I didn’t quite get before I moved here, even when I spent 90 days at a time (the maximum allowed under ESTA, cheeeeers to the visa waiver program amirite) staying with my sister in New York, or Dallas, or here, in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Like I said, sometimes you need to properly live through things before you can say you know what it’s like.
There are no footpaths
(Don’t even get me started on the fact that they call them “sidewalks”. Did they feel as though, if it didn’t have the word “side” in there, people were liable to walk right down the middle of the road?!)
Where I live, on the southwest side of Fort Wayne, Indiana – in a “good” school area, because America has “good” and “bad” schools and a lot of it depends on how much money you have and the colour of your skin, and that’s also what’s wrong with America – the footpaths exist in and, in certain circumstances, directly around the housing estates. That’s it.
You can walk out of our housing estate and turn left, and within about three minutes – probably less if you’re not scrolling Instagram at the same time, but I wouldn’t know – you come to the end of the path. That’s it. It just ends, suddenly, like the last season of The Sopranos.
It’s not that the road ends, or that there’s nothing beyond the end of the path; the road keeps going and there are houses and fields and, I mean, who knows, honestly?! There could be a little ice-cream shop I’ve simply never reached! (There isn’t.)
It’s the same if you turn right, although you do get a little more path in that direction. You can walk to the next housing estate, or the one after that. But if you wanted to walk anywhere useful, say, to the local school, which is less than two miles away and is the school Atlas will be going to, if we still live here, there are no footpaths that would take you there.
I could walk to my sister’s house in a little over an hour, says Google, except for the fact that I’d be walking down the side of a winding country road and, as no one walks anywhere, none of the cars driving at breakneck speed down said country road would even be looking out for me.
It’s a bit of a chicken-egg question, right: are there no footpaths anywhere because no one in America walks anywhere (scenes from Wall E spring to mind), or does no one in America walk anywhere because there are no footpaths?!
The bread is all weirdly sweet
Not to bang on the same old drum, but is the bread weirdly sweet because Americans are addicted to sugar, or are Americans addicted to sugar because the breadmakers kept pumping it into their bread?! WE’LL NEVER KNOW.
There is very little good bread to be had in America – or, at least, in the part of America I live in. (I will caveat this by saying I haven’t tried every single bakery, but the bakeries I have tried have given me bread in cling wrap, and there is no bread on the planet that can maintain its crisp, crunchy crust when sweating inside plastic.)
The only acceptable sliced pan is the English Muffin Toasting Bread from Kroger, and even then it pales in comparison to anything you’d get at home. My kingdom for a loaf of Brennan’s Toastie pan. (I could, in fact, buy regular Brennans online, if I felt so inclined, for a criminal $6.29, but it’s not the Toastie pan so I’ve never bothered.)
The guns
I mean… the guns. Full stop.
There are more guns in America than there are people. There have been more mass shootings in the US this year than there have been days. (Those two facts are not unrelated.)
I joined a book club, and every other woman in the book club owned, and carried, a handgun.
I am not someone who is totally and utterly anti-gun, necessarily. The idea of going and shooting guns as a hobby doesn’t horrify me; the notion that you can go and buy a semi-automatic rifle without a background check in many US states, however, does.
But there are no nuanced conversations to be had about guns here. You are either pro-gun (and if you are pro-gun, you are pro all types of guns, for all types of people) or you are anti-gun.
There are no nuanced conversations to be had, period
I don’t know enough about American history to know exactly how the country became so divided, along so many lines, and in such a binary fashion. Like with the gun issue, it often feels like, in America, you can only be one of two things. Republican or Democrat. Liberal or conservative. Religious or atheist. Feminist or men’s rights activist. Dog person or cat person. Etc.
To the outsider – I still consider myself such, although perhaps when I get my Green Card I’ll feel differently, and start wearing cut-off jeans everywhere (I have the Crocs already) – it often feels like America puts people in boxes, along political lines.
If you are liberal when it comes to women’s rights, you must also be anti-gun and probably anti-military and you believe everything the New York Times tells you. If you are conservative in any way, you watch Fox News and you are anti-choice and you probably believe the pizza-gate conspiracy, at least to some extent or another.
These are vast generalisations, and stereotypes, too, but, in my (granted, limited, as I moved here in 2020 and spent two of the last three years in near total isolation with my nearest and dearest) experience, they’re pretty accurate.
Those who align their values with the Republican Party align all of their values with the Republican Party. I have never seen anyone toe the line the way Americans toe the line, when it comes to their political party of choice. For a nation so obsessed with freedom, a lot of Americans seem very happy to row in with whatever their political overlords are directing them to do or think.
Freedom at all costs! But, wait, not THAT freedom
I think I have heard the word “freedom” more since I moved to the US three years ago than I had in the 35 years I lived in Ireland before that (although, granted, I’ve only seen Braveheart once).
The notion of “freedom” seems to be at the very heart of the very idea of America as a place, as an identity, as an idyll – but it also applies to a vanishingly small number of concepts and issues.
Freedom to own guns, for example, is very important; freedom to travel within the US; freedom to do and say whatever the fuck you want to do or say (and fuck whoever you offend).
But the freedom of kids to read the books they want – or may need – to read? No, no, not that kind of freedom.
The freedom of women to decide whether or not to give birth? No, no, no.
The freedom of parents to decide, in tandem with doctors, what the best course of medical treatment is for their trans or non-binary child? RIDICULOUS!
Like the “fiscally conservative” Democrat (liberal but only to the point at which I’m asked to sacrifice any of my own money), there is an oxymoronic quality to this notional freedom that is so cherished by any decent American patriot, and there is also a complete blindness to the fact that there is a double standard around the same.
What’s that Maya Angelou said? No one of us can be free until everybody is free.
(I did LOL when a friend of mine here in Fort Wayne posted an excerpt from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye on Facebook, absolutely aghast at the idea that this is being stocked in school libraries – heaven forbid children are ever exposed to literature about child sexual abuse that might better inform them as to how to speak to someone about their own experiences – and one of the first commenters suggested that “whoever wrote this” should immediately be arrested for writing such filth. Acclaimed American novelist Toni Morrison died in 2019.)
The “healthcare” situation
Medical debt is the number one reason for bankruptcies in the US, and, having lived here for three years, I can see why.
When I gave birth to Atlas in October of 2021, we had pretty robust health insurance through Brandin’s job. It was especially fortunate because I ended up having an emergency C-section and spent four nights in hospital. Our medical bills totalled $100,000 (although after our insurance paid its share, we ended up footing the bill for approximately $6,000 of that).
We were billed separately for my hospital stay and for Atlas’; his paediatrician visits (five in total) were their own line item; there was a charge for my pain relief; the C-section surgery itself; the anaesthetist (as if I could have had the C-section without one)… the list goes on.
If we had been uninsured, we wouldn’t have been billed the full $100k; there are “discounts” for you if you’re uninsured. But that almost makes the whole thing more egregious. What’s the actual cost of these procedures?
For the months Brandin was unemployed – he lost his job the week before Thanksgiving, at the end of November, and started a new job the second week in March – we paid privately for insurance through the marketplace” which is supposed to help you find the most affordable option. It ended up costing roughly $500 per month, with a $12,000 “deductible”, meaning we would foot the bill for anything up to $12,000 in a calendar year.
Now that he’s employed again, he “gets” insurance through his employer, at a cost of $150 per paycheque. He’s paid weekly.
There are a lot of problems in America that, I think, should be attributed to the cost of healthcare. The opioid crisis, for example. While the pharmaceutical companies and the doctors they essentially bribed to prescribe opioids to their patients have a massive part to play in it, imagine if healthcare was free. Imagine if, instead of taking prescription painkillers for your back pain, you could just… go and get it treated? Instead of getting addicted to Fentanyl patches after the car accident that dislocated your shoulder, you could actually go through with all of the recommended physical therapy and maybe even have that operation you desperately need.
There is a sickness at the root of a society that doesn’t prioritise the health of its citizens, and nobody benefits from a healthcare system that has profit as a higher priority than patient care.
State-specific laws
I can be driving in my car in one US state and talking on the phone while holding said phone in my hand and when I drive over the state line into another state I am suddenly breaking the law and sorry but that makes no sense to me!
See also: workplaces that drug test their employees in states where, for example, marijuana is illegal. What if I had a long weekend in Michigan and smoked some weed where it’s totally fine and legal and above board?! Then I can get fired because I… went to another state and didn’t break the law?! MAKE IT MAKE SENSE!
The “I” in this scenario is entirely rhetorical. I don’t smoke weed any more because I genuinely take two drags and then do the most obvious Irish goodbye ever before falling asleep on the nearest soft surface.
Cheques
They’re wild for a cheque here. There are some things you literally cannot pay for unless you are paying with a cheque.
A blatant disregard for the chip and pin system
I have yet to meet a credit or debit card machine that does not have an option for me to entirely bypass my PIN if I, say, just can’t remember it. Most Americans I meet (and happen to ask this very specific, niche question) do not know the PIN for their cards, because they never need it.
Why are Americans so obsessed with the idea that they need guns for “personal safety”, while being simultaneously entirely nonchalant about the idea of protecting their personal finances?!
College debt
The average federal student loan debt in the US is $37,000. Yes, that’s just under $40,000 (granted, less than half the price of having a baby) of debt for the “privilege” of going to college in the sixth richest nation (by GNI per capita) in the world. (Ireland comes in fifth, in case you wondered.)
It was weird, to realise just how much I took for granted about the country I called home for 35 years, but our incredible education system is definitely one of those things. I now know how fortunate I was, not only to go to college, but to get to study Arts, a degree track that has no defined career path (especially as I always knew I didn’t want to be a teacher).
It’s rare that US students have the ability to study something they love simply because they love it. When you know that your third-level education is going to saddle you with five figures of debt, it makes sense that you would choose your degree topic with your future ability to pay off that debt in mind.
Yet another thing that shouldn’t – but does, in America – end up being all about money.
Chicken salad
“Chicken salad” does not mean what you think it means.
A few months after I first moved in with Brandin, I told him I was going to make a chicken salad for dinner. I marinated two chicken breasts in spices – probably mostly cumin, my favourite spice – and I fried them in the cast iron with a little garlic and a little butter. I mixed up some baby spinach leaves and some rocket (they call that arugula here, another baffling difference) and drizzled them with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and then I chopped up some cherry tomatoes and some radishes and some red onion, and I laid the chicken on top of the leaves and artfully tossed the tomatoes and radishes next to them and I have honestly never seen him look so confused.
Because this is what they call chicken salad in this godforsaken country:
The worst thing about all of this – aside from the fact that it’s basically shredded chicken and mayonnaise, for crying out loud – is that I keep forgetting that this is what they call chicken salad in this godforsaken country!
So, when I saw that Chicken Salad Chick, a restaurant that specialises in chicken salad, was opening up in Fort Wayne, I was thrilled! Delighted! Excited! On the edge of my seat!
It’ll be just like Sprout! I thought to myself.
(I accept that I will 100% go to Chicken Salad Chick when it opens next week and it is very likely that I will think it delicious, as I have with all American things I turned my nose up to – like chocolate lasagna and corn casserole and deep-fried turkey at Thanksgiving.)
The American dream
When I first moved here, I remember being awed at the sheer size of America. It really did feel like the land of opportunity, where anyone could achieve their dreams if they just worked hard enough, dreamt big enough and held out long enough.
But the more time I’ve spent here, I’ve realised that the opportunities are only there, honestly, for the rare few: those who are born into enough privilege not to get bogged down in college or medical debt (or both), or those who manage to claw their way out of them.
And the concept of the American dream, though it does imply that you can achieve whatever you want, has a flip side: if you don’t make it, if you don’t succeed in getting out of whatever mess you’ve got into because you live in a country that encourages debt and discourages education and penalises you for being sick, well, you’ve no one to blame but yourself.
You could have made it. Whose fault is it that you didn’t?
I call it bandit country now...
Irish in NH and yes to all of this. No footpaths (except in estates) here either, made the chicken salad mistake when I ordered a chicken salad sandwich. Not a fence or hedge to be seen. No one hangs out their washing. Ice cream vans? The sheer volume of energy drinks but no Lucozade? Never seen so many pickup trucks in my life. Why % milk, can’t we just say whole, skimmed or semi skimmed?