How relaxed people are. People sit at a cafe...just to sit and drink a coffee or smoke. It's amazing what not having to work 3 jobs to afford rent, being crushed under the weight of student loans, or not have to worry about getting sick because you have universal healthcare will do for your mental health.

How far behind America is and how much the “America is #1” sentiment is a joke at this point. Maybe I had rose-tinted glasses on while on holiday in the UK and Spain, but it seems like the rest of the modern world has figured out universal healthcare, free/affordable education, and work-life balance.....and the list could go on much further.

Meanwhile, half of the US views views these things as extreme socialism/communism and would prefer that a gun has more rights than a person.

I've told this story before on a different account, but it's worth repeating.

When I was in college, I did a study abroad trip that was in a little town in Italy. We (one traveling partner and I) got there on Sunday at about 3PM local time after traveling for around 24 hours (-> New York -> Milan, then a train to near Trieste). When we arrived, _everything_ was closed. Stores, restaurants, everything.

We were starving, though. The last thing we ate was the breakfast on the plane about 6 hours earlier, and we wouldn't get more food until the first trip breakfast the next morning. So, we want wandering around looking for food.

After a couple hours, we found a restaurant with its doors open. It was empty inside, but there was one employee there. He didn't speak English, we didn't speak Italian, but we managed to communicate "Hey, we're here to eat." He motioned for us to sit down. A few minutes later, he brought us each a plate of food. We never ordered or anything, but we were starving, so we just ate. About halfway through eating, an older woman came down and I think asked us how it was... she didn't speak English either, but we gave her a thumbs up, which apparently translated well enough. We tried to ask for a check, but he just waved us off.

That's about when we realized, they weren't open. They lived upstairs, they were cooking themselves dinner, and we wandered in hungry and confused so they fed us. We came back a couple days later, and it was a much more normal restaurant experience: we were seated, given menus, had a waiter that spoke English, etc.

It was a huge WTH moment, but in a good way.

The US Army did a Twitter PR campaign for Memorial Day one year and it backfired tremendously. It asked “How did serving impact you?” along with a video of some poor PFC talking about how the Army made his life better.



The thread got tens of thousands of replies from vets and family members describing PTSD, losing loved ones, injuries, and how bad the VA and the Army had treated people coming back.



The Army ended up putting out a statement like “thanks for your sharing your real stories, we’re committed to your mental health blah blah blah.”.

Hobby Lobby defending their decision to stay open during the Covid lockdowns by saying they were essential because they sold fabrics for mask making, and putting out a letter that said the founder's wife a had a vision from God that told her to keep stores open because God will weather us from the storm. Not a great way to spin it when many people already refuse to shop there because of the owner's wackadoodle beliefs, not using barcodes, and not to mention, smuggling Iraqui artifacts into the US, later having to pay a $3 million fine, and return everything back to Iraq.