Why is america not the greatest country in the world

Jake Paul insisted that "America is the greatest country in the world" - and people swiftly ripped him apart.

In a year that's seen fatal mass shootings in schools and the overturn of fundamental rights for women, the internet personality and boxer took to his Twitter to express how the nation is apparently the best place to be.

"America is the greatest country in the world, no nation compares even when times are bad.

"Happy 4th and God bless America," Paul wrote.

People didn't hesitate to point out that other Western parts of the globe aren't struggling with mass killings of children at schools.

Other people noted that women in Australia and the UK don't have their fundamental rights taken away.

"I don't know how exactly to determine which country is the best… but maybe start with a country where children aren't hunted down and slaughtered in schools? A country where [Black]people aren't being publicly executed purely for being black. Just a thought," one wrote.

Another added: "Can't even lie the UK stomps on the US, better healthcare, better education system, better standards of living and we probably have far more equality than anywhere else like in the Uk no one really cares who you are what skin colour you are or where you come from tbh."

A third wrote: "People carry around guns, there's no free healthcare, high percentage of people live in poverty and women just lost the rights to have a say about their own bodies….but [woohoo] America!!"

Other people believed that Americans as the 'blind victims of propaganda: "This does not sound like a free country to me, as somebody who lives in an actual free country. Americans are blind victims of propaganda and I genuinely feel sorry for them. American propaganda is as effective as Russian and Chinese."

Despite this, some Americans didn't agree with this sentiment.

"What doesn't sound like a free country to u? It's literally free, most places don't even have freedom of speech it ain't perfect, but it's the closest you'll get from having total freedom, which is extremely important," someone wrote in response.

Some also threw in a link and diagram of the World Freedom Index in the comments. And the US isn't even in the top 10 freest countries in the world.

Elsewhere, although Paul won a tremendous $36m in fight earnings when he became a boxer last year, his brother Logan said that he became "poor" following the recent Bitcoin crash.

Speaking on the imPaulsive podcast about his money in the ring, Logan said: "It doesn't matter; he put it all in crypto! He's poor!"

This came after Jake hit out at President Joe Biden and tried to blame him for cryptocurrency tanking over recent weeks, although it is an unregulated market that has nothing to do with the prez.

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Ten years ago that obnoxiously superior phrase was uttered in the pilot of what would go on to become one of my favorite TV shows of all time: The Newsroom. Written by Aaron Sorkin, it continues to be a source of great writing and interesting philosophical points, but if anything else it serves me now as the inspiration to write this article. As I’ve grown older, those few words have started to eat into me, and they’ve led me to wonder about a great many things. Things about our country, our government - the role it plays, the role we play, the role it SHOULD play. You know, simple existentialist type stuff. As these thoughts occurred however, I've developed somewhat of an answer, or at least as much of one as a thoroughly uninformed grad-student can have.

Fear. People, like all living things, respond to fear - fear of death, fear of hunger, fear of violence. The fear of being alone in a vast, cruel, and otherwise terribly unforgiving world. It is a great and terrible motivator to be afraid. And yet, it seems as though Americans have been afraid for as long as I can remember. I was born in 1998, old enough to just have a memory of what 9/11 was like. But having grown up in the country it shaped, I'm not sure if having a memory of what it was like before is a gift or a curse. Prior to 9/11, America was in essence, no different than it is now. We suffered attacks from powers foreign and domestic, we lost people in wars, some justified and some not, and we argued those justifications just as we do now, fresh over the graves of those who died fighting them. And yet, even in the midst of all of that, Americans didn’t seem afraid. At least it seemed that way.

Maybe that's an anachronism of history, maybe it's just naïve to think it didn't used to be this hard on the part of an author who is admittedly, sorely out of touch with his generation. But at any rate, it seems all Americans are able to do now is react to fear. Fear drives prejudice, it drives anger, it kills. What I fear however isn’t my fellow Americans. More than anything, I fear the collapse of this country from the apathy induced by this fear we all seem to know. I would argue acceptance was the way to counter that, but acceptance has never been a historical American value. A country composed of immigrants from the start, unrest and violence have, depending on what shade human you are, likely been a constant. And yet, there is one thing that can fix us, and has in the past, that being a sense of community. It's why I brought up 9/11 earlier, not because it was a horrifying geopolitical event, but because it serves as both the strike that split us and our last best chance to reconnect.

Anyone who lived through 9/11 will always say 9/12 was America at its best. People, some having never met, in difference of ideology and opinion, in lifestyles so far apart they can't even be described, were united in mourning as Americans. As a national community we came together and faced what is still an unspeakable trauma. But just as quickly as we united, we fell to pieces over differences of opinion. If I haven’t made a thesis in this article yet, let me do so now. We sit, as humans always have, at a crossroads in history. To save this country for future generations, we have to make a choice. We must learn to compromise again, lest we let the extremes of this nation tear it apart. To accomplish this, we have to relearn some ideals. Ideals like my neighbors are not threats and my thoughts, while conceived with good intentions, are not infallible.

Most importantly, we have to learn our ideological opponents are not caricatures of their beliefs and most assuredly not enemies. Larry David once said “A good compromise is when both parties are unhappy”, and I think the key to everything I've talked about is hidden in that sentence. Fanaticism, dogmatism, and extremism gets a society nowhere, and so I think it's time to start leaving the table a little unhappy. I think it's time to pick up those ideas spoken of earlier and truly commit to them. I think we as a people should do it, and we should do it now. We should do it for our values, we should do it for any reason we want, but most of all, we should do it so that history students 500 years from now don't write about the collapse of the world's longest democracy, they go visit White House and see that it still stands. We aren’t the greatest country in the world anymore, honestly I don't know if we ever were, but if we take up the cause as I’ve written it, maybe we can be.

Nathaniel Grim is a Master of International Affairs student here at GPS.

Nate was born in Davis, California in 1998, but spent the better part of 10 years growing up in the wonderful town of Los Alamos, New Mexico. In 2011, Nate returned to San Ramon, California where he completed his associates, and then returned to New Mexico once again to continue his undergraduate degree before finally changing it up and landing at UCSD.

Photo by Shari Sirotnak on Unsplash

While teaching English in Cairo, I noticed something that happened in my classes each time a discussion arose about the problems in Egypt. The student who brought up an issue was quickly shushed by others around them with the words “Ahsan min musr mafish.” I knew enough Arabic to understand what this meant:

“There is nothing better than Egypt.”

Egypt at that time was ruled by President Mubarek, and social unrest was becoming more apparent even a few years before the Arab Spring. I wonder whether my former students would say the same about Egypt now, after two military coups. They probably would.

What is it about countries — they can’t just like themselves, they have to be the BEST of everything? Yes, even despite all evidence to the contrary.

My Egyptian students made a distinction between the growing problems in the country and the concept of Egypt itself. It’s a strange and rather vague notion: that there exists a sort of Platonic idea of a country.

For what is a country if not everything that happens within it?

As July 4 rolls around, my social media feed has started to resemble my classes in Egypt. Some liberal Americans confess to feeling troubled about celebrating Independence Day while Trump is in office — but have no objections to a holiday which offers unrestrained fanfare for US militarism.

A few days ago, I watched Stephen Colbert, a progressive Democrat, tout American values as proof that “our great country is the last best hope for all mankind.”

I spat out my Fosters. Sorry, what?

(Just kidding, American friends. We don’t actually drink Fosters).

He went on to say that “what makes us great is what we believe in: all men are created equal, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

These lofty ideals are pulled from the Declaration of Independence. Colbert’s argument that America must continue to live up to these principles, was a means of criticising Trumpian policies such as the separation of immigrant families. It is a way of distinguishing between who America is and what America does. It is a denial of accountability.

What the late-night comedian failed to mention is that the US has NEVER lived up to these ideals. The Declaration of Independence did not extend to native Americans who were being systematically murdered and forced off their land.

When the document was created in 1776, African-Americans were still enslaved, and would continue to be for almost another century. On Independence Day in 1852, Frederick Douglass, leader of the Abolitionist movement, said:

“This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn…”

Despite the endless chest-beating on both sides of US politics, America fails its own citizens on unaffordable healthcare, mass shootings, police brutality, (“life”), mass incarceration, poverty (“liberty”), racism, low minimum wages, class inequality (“the pursuit of happiness”) and so on and so on.

The suggestion that America is the greatest country in the world is becoming increasingly ludicrous to the rest of us.

Not to mention, of course, its shocking treatment of migrants. Every time another news story emerges, liberal Americans cry, “This is not who we are!” But for anyone who has studied history: America, it is who you are. Ask the Chinese, the Italians, the Irish. When you do something repeatedly, how can you refuse to accept that it’s who you are? Perhaps a more useful starting point would be: “This is who we’ve always been, but we want to change.”

Photo by Todd Diemer on Unsplash

On the world stage, America’s unwavering belief in its own greatness has led to its involvement in horrendous conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Libya in the last 20 years alone — under both Democratic and Republican Presidents. In the 50 years before that, add Sudan, Yugoslavia, Haiti, Panama, Cambodia, Korea, Vietnam, and so on and so on.

When army veteran and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard stated her position that US intervention is harmful, Stephen Colbert (yes, him again) shouted over the top of her that “the United States is a force for good in the world.”

I wonder how both Republicans and Democrats alike who promote strident US militarism actually measure this “goodness”: is it in the number of bombs falling in foreign countries or the carnage of civilian bodies piling up?

America is not alone in trumpeting its virtuousness in a world of evil. Nationalist rhetoric forms the basis of propaganda in all dictatorships (like Egypt) — and is rapidly being adopted around the world, including here in Australia.

After Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s surprise election victory in May, he immediately hailed Australia as the greatest country in the world. His catchcry “How good’s Australia?” is the weapon he wields as he blithely hacks into many of the aspects of Australian life that have long made us “the lucky country”: a fair taxation system, basic welfare, a strong workers’ movement, the highest minimum wages in the world, and universal access to healthcare and education.

If you dare to question whether everything Australia does is necessarily great, such as our own unconscionably inhumane treatment of refugees, you may very well find yourself hounded out of the country.

In Australia, we have our own version of “This is not who we are!” It is the one that loudly proclaims there are only a handful of racists in this country — willfully ignoring the fact that white colonisation was founded on, perpetuated and continues to benefit from systemic racism and genocide.

The belief that one’s country is the greatest in the world is the new opium of the masses, lulling us into a blind acceptance of the atrocities occurring all around us.