Stranger in a Strange Land

When you feel like a foreigner in your own country

I have a confession to make.

American culture feels utterly strange and alien to me. I've felt that way a long time, but over the last several years it's become more and more acute. The United States has become a place that's totally unrecognizable to me now. I just can't believe what people accept as normal, and it keeps getting worse almost by the day.

I've always felt somewhat alienated and disconnected from mainstream American life, and I don't know why. Even when I was a little kid everything around me seemed so twisted and bizarre. I didn't get why people saw this state of affairs as a normal or desirable. Even back then I knew this wasn’t the way human beings were supposed to live, and that there was something unnatural—or even inhuman—about the American way of life. Nothing I’ve seen subsequently has altered that opinion, only reconfirmed it.

What's even more odd is that I grew up here and have spent my entire life in the United States. It’s the only country I've ever lived in. So how can it be that this culture seems so profoundly disturbing and alien to me? I can't figure it out. I feel like a foreigner in my own country. The few times I've been fortunate enough to travel outside of the United States it feels more like home to me than my actual home. More normal and healthy, somehow; and perhaps even more free.

Some of my observations about the changes this country has undergone within my lifetime may illustrate what I’m talking about.

***

Local businesses are pretty much gone now. Everything is either a big-box retailer or chain store. I can remember a time when that wasn't the case. Restaurants and cafes are still an exception where I happen to live, but I can still remember when ordinary people owned things like local hardware stores and hobby shops. I can still recall my grandmother taking me to the neighborhood “dime store”.

When I was younger you never saw security guards anywhere except perhaps in a bank or a mall. Now they're everywhere, even in grocery stores. Security cars prowl the parking of lots of just about every major business.

And what's with every store having some paid employee whose only purpose is to stand at the entrance and passive-aggressively "greet" you as you walk in? I think this bizarre practice originated with Wal-mart (which we also didn’t have when I was growing up), but now it's appears to have spread everywhere. Was there some some sort of organic demand for this? Do people really desire this when they go out shopping? Are we supposed to feel “at home?” If not, then why are corporations doing it? It's just so strange. Leave that shit in Dixie where it belongs—we keep to ourselves in Wisconsin.

You can't get on or off a freeway off-ramp or make a left turn at a major intersection anymore without someone standing there with a cardboard sign begging for spare change. I never used to see that sort of poverty outside the poorest and most desperate parts of town (which, sadly, were usually occupied by minorities). Now it's everywhere. It seems to have started with the 2008 financial crisis and has gotten worse and worse ever since. I’ve even started to see them in the tonier western suburbs where I work.

When I was younger police officers walked around in light-blue shirtsleeves and handed out baseball cards. They were friendly and not intimidating (at least if you were white). Now they’re like an occupying army, complete with cutting-edge military hardware and clad in all black uniforms and armor like something out of the Empire in Star Wars.

Younger people seem to think that extreme military worship has always been a part of American culture. It hasn't. The whole notion of groveling before anyone wearing a uniform and "thanking them for their service" is a recent phenomenon. It's not normal.

The idea that soldiers—and now police and firefighters, too—are class above the rest of us is so disturbing. We've made military members into a kind of superempowered elite class with rights and privileges far above those of ordinary citizens. Every business falls over itself to offer active and retired servicemen more discounts and privileges than the next one. I remember my shock the first time I drove into a parking lot and saw special parking spots next to the door exclusively for military members. WTF?

There's a term for this philosophy—Spartanism. The previous ideal in the United States was that of the "citizen soldier" who was just an ordinary citizen like everyone else who decided to serve their country, but it was no big deal. They weren't anything special, and they didn't expect to be treated differently than anyone else. In Spartan culture, by contrast, soldiers were a separate and distinct class of people who ruled over the lower classes—the Helots—who were expected to serve them and to whom they could do anything with impunity, up to and including killing them. Is that what we've become?

Celebrations of the military used to be confined to the major patriotic holidays: the Fourth of July (today), Veteran's Day and Memorial Day. Totally reasonable, and not unusual in most countries. Now it's all the time. Every event, from the lowliest church picnic to the largest sporting events, feature the requisite salutes to "the heroes." The so-called "patriotic" displays at sporting events have taken on a disturbing, almost Nuremburg-rally-like quality. Supposedly we need to thank them for "keeping us safe." Safe from what? I'm a grown man—I can keep myself safe thank-you very much. If we were truly in danger from anything I would be fighting against it myself.

It's the same with guns. When I was younger, guns were for hunting. Pretty much the only people who had guns that I knew growing up were hunters, and they used them in the fall when they went up north to hunt deer. Now gun fetishism is woven into the fabric of our society. Ordinary people fantasize about overthrowing the government or becoming a vigilante. They salivate at the thought of putting a bullet into their fellow Americans. When did that happen? How did that happen? Maybe I was just naive when I was younger, but it didn't seem to be that way. You didn’t need to post signs on the door of your business telling people to leave their firearm outside.

It really strikes me whenever I visit the supermarket. I see people walking around with bloated and distended bodies, or riding around on scooters. Shelf after shelf is lined with processed junk food and sugary drinks. And I think to myself, 'Is this is really the best society there's ever been in history like we’ve been told?’ Nobody looks physically or emotionally healthy. They look sick and tired. They look beaten down. They don't look like people who are thriving in any sense of the term. People are stressed and anxious, and it shows.

There's a pervasive atmosphere of fear that lies under the surface of everything in the United States today. People who travel here from other countries feel it, even if they can't quite articulate it. Americans are some of the most scared and angry people on the planet. It's like the whole society is inside a pressure cooker, and the pressure keeps ratcheting up year after year. Maybe that's why people are constantly “snapping" and going on spontaneous shooting sprees or becoming addicted to drugs (e.g. the “deaths of despair”). Mass shootings are now an almost daily occurrence all across the country. The news doesn’t even bother reporting a lot of them anymore. Deaths from drugs and suicide are at epidemic levels. People have a vague sense that there’s something wrong with the way things are, but they don’t know who to blame or what to do about it. And they’re constantly being played against one other to keep them from finding out.

And that’s not to mention the lack of community and the isolation and poor health outcomes imposed by the built environment centered exclusively around cars.

America has become totally unrecognizable from the place I grew up in.

***

But it's more than just the culture. It's the people.

Americans seem to me to go around in an almost crazed or manic state. They can't abide by the slightest hint of silence or being alone with their thoughts. It's like if they even had a moment of silence or self-reflection they would absolutely lose their minds. They seem to be constantly blaring loud music, watching television, playing video games, or incessantly scrolling on their phones. Every issue is seen in black-and-white terms and people are incapable of understanding subtlety or nuance. And what’s with telegraphing your political views and lifestyle choices by putting decals and bumper stickers all over your car? Who cares?

Americans don't know how to act around other people. They are poorly socialized. It's like they are living in a simulation where they are the only player. Americans act like boors and louts, and are proud of it. They walk around covered in piercings and tattoos like some sort of extra in a Road Warrior movie. If you go to other countries people actually know how to dress and behave around other people. They look normal. They are cognizant of the fact that they are part of a society and that other people matter. Other people are treated with basic dignity and respect. It's simplistic but it's true—Americans just don't give a fuck about anyone else.

I regularly hear stories about service workers who are screamed at, belittled, bullied, and abused by random customers. Who are told that don't "deserve" to get paid enough to live on, or told to “get a real job." They are told that they’re the reason for inflation (and not supply chain bottlenecks or greedy corporations and CEOs). And then there's the whole "Karen" phenomenon. What the hell is going on here? What in God’s name is wrong with these people? I can't understand this mentality. Thankfully, I don't see too much of it in my own life, maybe because “Midwestern nice” is still a thing.

Where I live people constantly drive by in cars and motorcycles with coughing and sputtering engines louder than the average jet plane. Sometimes they blast earsplittingly loud music as well. It's a permanent roar that lasts pretty much twenty-four hours a day during the short summer months that I can’t escape from, even inside the walls of my own house (Seriously, I can't stand it here anymore—I’m living in a literal Hell. Plz send help!!!).

It's a cliche, but Americans really are the most shallow and superficial people on earth. They don't care care about anything except their jobs and making more money than everyone else. When you talk an American, you're really taking to their agent. Work is their entire life. Everyone is running the rat race trying to give their kids a leg up in the increasingly bitter competition for status where the penalty for losing is being deprived of the most basic things needed to survive. Of course, the end result is that their kids will only end up doing the exact same thing in the next round of the incessant winner-take-all tournament that is American life. You can’t base a society around pure competitive individualism—it simply doesn't work. Competition is not a social glue; it's a solvent, and we’re increasingly coming apart at the seams.

One of the best descriptions of American society I ever read came from Reddit, and I’m sorry I didn’t save the comment. But, going from memory, it was from someone who had managed to escape and move abroad. This person said that being born in the United States was like being automatically entered into a competition that you never signed up for.

And we're socially policed by our fellow citizens to conform to this nightmarish social order—even to celebrate it. If you question it in the slightest you will suffer ostracism, derision and outright hostility like you’ve never known. They will talk about how rich we supposedly are and how we're the only country on earth with "freedom" and the lack of pesky regulations ensuring things like decent wages and working conditions that interfere with that “freedom”. They'll talk about our economic "dynamism," as if that does anything for the average person. They talk about how anyone can become a billionaire. They’ll recite the same bumper-sticker bromides and tired cliches from motivational speeches over and over again. They'll talk about how everyone else in the world wants to move here, and how grateful you ought to be every single day that you were born here. And if you don’t like it, you’re a “loser” and you deserve what you get.

And this is everywhere! It’s like being in a zombie movie.

***

It's just so lonely here. I feel alienated and socially isolated from everyone else. I walk around every day feeling like a complete stranger in the only country I've ever known. There’s no one I can talk to.

I don't have any friends here. Nor, really, do I want any. There's nothing I see in ninety-nine percent of Americans I encounter that would motivate me to become friends with them, even if there were the remotest chance of that happening. We would have nothing in common. Most of the few close friends I've had have been people originally from outside the United States, or at least have lived outside the United States for an extended period of time. Maybe that makes me an "elitist" despite growing up near the bottom of the social totem pole. I don't care.

If feel like there's something missing in my fellow Americans. I don’t know how to describe it. It's like they have no inner life. You can see it in their eyes. Every time I look at them, I hear the words of Quint from Jaws: "Y'know the thing about a shark, he's got... lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be livin'..." That's honestly how most Americans seem to me. When you look at even the poorest and most desperate people in other parts of the world, there's a certain basic dignity and spark in their eyes that you just don't see here even among nominally successful, upper middle-class people.

***

I desperately wish I could leave. There's nothing keeping me here, after all. My last living family member (my only cousin) died this past March. But given my age, my skill set, and my lack of foreign language skills, it appears I'm trapped in this rapidly unraveling society forever. If there were any way out—any way at all—I wouldn't hesitate to take it. There’s no one I would be leaving behind. All I need is a roof over my head, enough food to eat, and some time to read and write. If anyone deserves to escape, it's me. Yet despite those meager needs, I just don't see any way out, and it's really dragging me down. Jut another broken dream in a long list of many, I guess. I can't imagine spending the rest of my life here. Maybe dying is the only way out.

Anyway, thanks for reading my cri de cœur. I wasn't going to publish this, but given that it's the Great Patriotic Holiday today here in the United States (yes, I still fly my American flag), it seemed like an appropriate time to get it off my chest. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming next time.