Leaving kids to nap outside a coffee shop in winter...I'd love to see the horror on people's faces in the US. Makes perfect sense to me, and I do this outside my house from time to time (secluded backyard of course), but I'm pretty sure child protective services would be hauling me off before I finished my latte.
..and that article is from 1997. I wonder what the response would've been today. Not better, I fear.
Being a Dane myself I can't help smiling when seeing the parent story. I've got a 15 month old daughter, and throughout her entire life she's slept outside for daytime naps. Besides the random playing kid making too much noise, it's been completely uneventful.
As a bonus, it means that you've got 1-2 hours of lovely silence indoors before hell breaks loose again...
My brother in law is from Denmark and he told me about this practice many years ago as a way of relating to me just how neurotic and afraid parents are in America.
I asked him why he moved here, and he said "America is where you get rich". I often meditate on whether he made a Faustian bargain or not.
I spend a lot of time trying to understand the country I was born in. What's the right approach to this place? Is this a community or a marketplace? Newt Gingrich says marketplace, and that seems to be the opinion of the owners in this country.
Is this place so far gone that a reasonable man will try to extract as many resources and expatriate his money and his family to Norther Europe?
Hunter S. Thompson called America a Kingdom of Fear and then shot himself. Al Giordano tried to help through activism but concluded this country is psychopathic and moved to S. America.
N. Europe beats the US on almost every quality of life metric. The towns, cities and trains in Europe I see on travel shows just look prettier than the sprawling pattern of chain restaurants and gas stations I see here. Sprawl bothers me on a very base and fundamental level.
I overpay for crappy broadband and healthcare and my neighbors are irrationally afraid and half our tax dollars fund a bloated war machine. For the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world, things kind of suck here.
I've moved to some of the best cities this country has to offer and I found them lacking. In Austin and Boulder my girlfriend would be repeatedly harassed by schizophrenics let loose on the streets.
I spent an hour conversing with a mentally unstable tattooed skin head in Austin armed with a claw hammer for protection from other homeless. If he is to be believed, and he seemed sincere, the police bound and gagged him to a chair and beat him for an hour while denying him his anti psychotics.
The homeless in Austin know not to ask for much. In Boulder a street kid with dreads will sneer if you give him any less than a $5. The wretched of Austin just ask for quarters. They feel lucky that they aren't scheduled for lethal injection on felony murder charges.
I was in Austin when the state executed a homeless kid that not even the prosecutor thought killed anyone. Four homeless kids take LSD. One snaps and kills two others. Texas executes the one kid that didn't hurt anyone on felony muder charges. The actual murderer was given a life sentence because he took a plea.
The only silver lining I can take from all this is that because things suck and the US is a huge unified market, it is a great country to innovate and solve people's problems with technology.
I used to spend a lot of thought time getting political or philosophical about my complaints above, I have come to realize if we are to be saved, our salvation will only come through technological innovation.
Don't believe everything you see in travel shows... I live in The Netherlands, and I can tell you we have out share of ugly sprawl (look up The Bijlmer near Amsterdam on wikipedia or google maps for instance). We have homeless people too, health insurance is mandatory but more expensive than in the US, a fair share of issues with immigrants, and a huge tax burden. It's not all peaches and cream here!
Actually, I believe is to be the case. As late as the early to mid-90s, I'd say there was no place like the US of A (even though the Nordic countries were very nice also then, they were behind on certain aspects). Today US has noticeably declined (compared to some world benchmark, at least) while some countries have clearly progressed - the Nordic countries very much so. Visit the new Old World, with open and honest eyes (not every single thing is perfect, or even better than US, I'm talking broad strokes), engage the people and hear their opinions (they will have many, because the US is still dear to a lot of people from Europe who would very much like to see US step up its game as a true world leader in all areas - everyone wants a role model, and it's sad to see the hero waste his life away).
As a refugee from Amerika, I agreed with you all the way until your conclusion. What makes you think technological innovation will provide salvation?! It seems to me exactly the opposite. Increasingly, technical innovations are being used by the government against the people, and the people are becoming increasingly degenerate through their indiscriminate use of technology.
