Pathetic conclusion:Half a year not enough to understand America

Three months after returning from a half year's stint in the U.S., I start to feel I've digested my impressions.

I went there with the expectation that in a month or two I would really start to understand "America".

Well. I was wrong. I wonder now if there is anything I understand at all.

I feel pathetic to admit that only a very few basic things have made their way to my brain, as for instance:

1. America is not a nation. Some Americans say they would like to become one, but nobody pursues such a goal seriously. The concept of a common good seems alien to the American psyche. It's all about advancing the interests of one's own, or of one's family, or at the most of the group/congregation/sub-culture one for the moment has chosen to associate one self with. America is no more a nation than is Europe. America has a common language as a common denominator, which must be a huge advantage, but I don't see the expected gain.



2. For many Americans, also for well educated people, the situation in foreign countries at the time of the ancestors' emmigration to America overshadows any understanding for what has happened ever since.
   The Holocaust and the Cold War could each in their own way be argued to fault that statement, but the end effect is the same: The old world is understood as fundamentally flawed, if not outright bad and evil, and its only hope would be to join America, American culture, American values and the American way.



3. Americans do not share Europeans' experiences on three fundamentally important points:
   
   
   • Americans have no collective memory of the horrors of war for a victimized civilian population.
   
   
   • Americans have no collective perception of guilt for the damage inflicted on other nations by colonialism or war.
   
   
   • Americans have no appreciation for the democratic system's ability to function as an alternative to civil war, as an arena were social conflicts can be peacefully defused by means of national compromizes.
   
   

Americans are just like you and me.
They walk on two legs and have symetrical faces.

But they are not just like you or me when discussing how society works, or ought to function. This is important to remember, so one doesn't become too doctrinary when advocating American solutions to our problems.