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Most Europeans’ opinions on the U.S. come from the Internet and the news. But, as one German visitor found out, those only scratch the surface. An extended stay in North Carolina produced 3-D insights that you don’t get from just watching a flat screen.
Is the United States a nation in decline? Do statistics point in the direction of a future belonging to the developing world and not the developed world? Has imperial overstretch spawned a historic shift that will see the People’s Republic of China become the world’s next leader within our lifetime, replacing the giant that dominated the globe for the past century?
To answer these questions, it is helpful to spend some time in the United States these days – not in New York City, Washington’s corridors of power or the high-tech clusters of California but in deep rural America. I had the opportunity to do so this year, in the middle of a presidential election campaign that captivated the nation, one month in North Carolina, in the research triangle of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill.
As one can easily see in daily life, problems for the average American are growing. While soaring gasoline prices have become a fixture on the morning news, inflation is eroding people’s buying power. Shopping in a supermarket, I was surprised at how much good quality costs, certainly more than in Germany. Many are affected by the partial collapse of the housing market. Health care is a major concern.
Another surprise is how close the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan seem, despite being halfway around the world. Every day, the media reports the latest casualties by name and asks Americans how they feel. Moreover, North Carolina has many soldiers. Big military camps are situated both alongside the Atlantic coast of this state of nine million and in the interior. From there, units head out for the Middle East while others come home.
From a German perspective, one would say that there is a lot of pressure on people, from within and without. But, living with Americans, one sees other parts of their lives that keep spirits buoyant. People are friendly, very hospitable, open-minded and in a certain way more serious than Germans. The work ethic is clearly more rigorous and religion and church attendance do really matter. And walking through the streets of the cities or visiting a North Carolina high school, where 2,000 students are supposed to leave the compound clean after they depart in their yellow school buses and cars, I realize that it is hard to find the same mistreatment of public spaces as in Europe.
The way American society is organized or organizes itself indicates that the forces of social cohesion are stronger than in Europe. The principal of Riverside High School, at the outskirts of Durham, monitors the departure of his students like a policeman, showing at the same time that he is there for them, that he cares.
Many little scenes at Duke University tell the same story, both in the seminars and during the many social gatherings at lunch and in the evening when people eat, talk and drink together. By comparison, German society is one of lonely individuals who recognize but cannot overcome their situation.
The question of common ground in this multi-racial society of 300 million people, and whether it is ready to vote for a black president, is harder to answer. In public life in the South, a mixed couple is a rare exception, much less visible than in the big cities of Germany and Western Europe, even though in North Carolina black Americans constitute more than 20 percent of the population. But there is a will to live together and to overcome the burdens of a past when the blacks were slaves in North Carolina and beyond, and faced institutional discrimination for a century afterward.
The 40th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King played a prominent role in the media during my stay and showed how far U.S. society has advanced since his assassination. But the problems cannot be ignored. During Easter weekend, while working in North Carolina, one of my colleagues, a journalist from the Washington Post, was visited by his dark-skinned wife and daughter. He later said they felt unsafe in the streets of North Carolina, compared to their neighborhood in the Washington D.C. area, 250 miles away.
The U.S. mass media may be even trashier than Germany’s. But in the world of film, TV and entertainment, it seems the U.S. will always be the world leader with its offerings imitated everywhere.
The U.S. is a country in love with business and technology. Professors at Duke have a global outlook, not only because of their students who come from everywhere but also because they are connected with the whole world and travel frequently. Technical equipment, whether in the universities or in supermarkets, is years ahead of Europe.
Looking at technology, science, music, arts in general and TV, the U.S. will remain a powerhouse, certainly not a declining nation for the foreseeable time. The traveler comes home with the sense of a deep commitment to the community, of a society that hates foreign entanglements but knows that at some point one has to step up to the plate. America has progressed farther than Europe toward a multi-racial society and knows the difficulties. It is more dynamic than Europe and thrilled by the prospect of a new administration in office. All in all, the U.S. remains a society with a bright future.
© 2006 The Atlantic Times
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