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Without getting into any discussion about politics, I would like to address a few misconceptions people may about the United States. This is not a statement that I think my country is superior to any other in any way shape or form.

I belong to a gaming forum that, similiar to LitNet has members from across the globe. One popular thread there is "Misconceptions about your homeland". People debunked various myths about their native lands, such as Russian women don't look like men, and England is not a nation of bad cooks.

Somebody wrote the following excerpt about the US, and it is very much what I wanted to say:

We aren't all loud, rude, ignorant people, despite whatever your media might say, and your utmost belief in their purity of intent. In general, as with tourism everywhere, some of the loudest, rudest, most ignorant people are the ones who end up attracting attention to themselves, abroad.

We don't all eat cheeseburgers and swill coke. Many of us aren't monolingual. Very, very few of us walk around in gimme caps and drive pickup trucks. We're about as uniformly hick as you are.

We're a huge nation, made up of at least 12 geo-nations held together by the implied threat of governmental force. So don't make the mistake of assuming a single American type applies to all of us. It applies even less to us than assumptions made about a small area of your country applies to all its inhabitants, because of respective size.


Our political system of winner-take-all allows *** to slide into office for a considerable length of time, and gives them great visibility. This doesn't mean most people endorse that system--most don't, as the national voter count regularly shows--

The US is also not a ultra conservative, ultra religious country...while some regions are indeed that way, the country is huge and diverse and folks with all kinds of political/religious beliefs live here...It is easy to make assumptions about ANY country based on media depictions. I find it better to not swallow everything based on what the media and popular culture would have me believe.