Just another day in paradise.
I'm in my 60's now, retired, and when I was growing up I thought the USA was the place to go to. I was young, only a child, but there was, or so it seemed at the time, something magical about the place. Everyone seemed so wealthy and happy. Maybe it was the TV shows we watched, the rocket launches that gave me a lifelong interest in space, the big cars with their shiny chrome and V 8 engines, and that impression continued through the years as I was always slightly envious of them. I thought their lives were so much better than ours.
Now, though, after watching a video like this, which, to my mind is inexplicably confusing and unnecessarily brutal, and seeing other news stories of shootings in schools, shopping malls, concert halls, and hearing of tent cities, people being made bankrupt because they have the temerity to have a heart attack or whatever, the highest incarceration rates in the world, 60 to 70 hour working weeks without any time off, losing your job because you are ill for more than a week and can't go to work, being charged $40.00 to hold your new born baby, and being shot on a whim......
I know we have problems in the UK, but the USA is the last place on earth I would want to live in now, and it's a real shame my thoughts on the country have changed so much over my lifetime.
I'm not in any way anti American, far from it, but my envy from years ago has turned to sadness, sadness that a country I used to look up to and admire so much has lost that allure I found so fascinating as a kid watching the Apollo rockets launching their way up to the moon.
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