Folks, my point is not to trash other nations.
Rather, my point is that a large number of people – particularly American young people – have some idealized, romanticized visions of what they think country X is like, when in fact they have zero – and I mean ZERO – knowledge of what country X is really like, nor any knowledge of how good they have it here in the USA.
For example, take the above “the USA is all I know, but I’ll move to New Zealand.” New Zealand isn’t just “that beautiful place where they filmed Lord of the Rings.” It’s a nation on the other side of the world, that is essentially impossible to really learn about without going there, and significant study. A nation may look interesting, but the whole, “I wanna live in country X but have never visited there,” is, candidly, a really immature thing to say about pretty much anywhere.
Further, people who want to leave here ought to consider that it’s not just all the items I posted a few pages back they’d lose if they left. It’s different music; different driving rules; different social norms; different places to visit (i.e. no Disneyland; the Grand Canyon; or anywhere else Americans go); and a million other aspects of life that you can’t gauge without being there in person for a while.
Look, last year I had a discussion on this board with a young person who wanted to leave Minnesota and move to Sweden because he though it was so very civilized that workers there all took a break to drink coffee and eat a sweetroll (!?!). I remember thinking the person was impossible to take seriously.
