Is Life in War-torn Ukraine Preferable to Everyday Life in the U.S.?
America is #1...if you ignore the rest of the world.
I don’t hide my distaste for most things American. I understand there are worse places, but the country has become a morass of corruption, economic chicanery, and arbitrary violence.* Democracy is nearly nonexistent, with corporate agendas dictating governmental policies to benefit the country’s 1 percent oligarchs. The government leaders acting as patsies for the oligarchs (or oligarch government leaders) , the president included, fit target customer demographics for nursing homes and funeral parlors. Those same leaders are addicted to creating debt, ostensibly for my children’s grandchildren to pay. The general population is uneducated and grossly overweight due to a diet industrialized, sugary, tasteless, processed foodstuffs . The country’s pitiable health has led to a life expectancy that’s 57th highest in the world —behind “developing” countries like Albania and Lebanon. America’s car-focused urban planning and investor-focused “architecture” is an inconvenient, GHG-spewing eyesore. I have interests tethering me to the U.S., but I’ll likely depart to Europe as soon as those interests are resolved.
A few weeks ago, a friend sent me some videos of Ukrainian street life that reinforced my distaste for the American way of life. The videos were taken in the town of Lviv in May, 2023 —i.e. last month, in the middle of that country’s war with Russia. Lviv’s population is 720,000, which is about the same as Denver or Nashville, but Lviv could hardly be more different than those American cities. The videos show beautiful architecture and human-scaled planning. The walkable, car-free streets teem with life —musicians performing, children playing, adults walking, talking, and eating together. There’s a notable paucity of American fixtures of fat people, tent encampments, and six lane roads cutting through central business districts. I appreciate there are parts of the country being upended by war and what I’m writing is not meant to trivialize that situation. But it’s hard to think of anywhere in America today that’s as beautiful and brimming with life as Lviv, even during wartime.
If there’s a throughline for what I’m attempting to communicate in this newsletter —communicating to myself as much as my small readership —is that life can be great. Bodies can be vital and strong. Emotions can be balanced. Air can be clean. Cities can be beautiful and designed to support human connection. But just like 12-step recovery, the first step in getting to great is an admission that things suck.
*America’s genesis is rooted in genocide and slavery, so corruption, economic chicanery, and violence are far from new facets of American life. The only new thing is their scale of the and the technology that has accelerated their implementation.
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