49 Things I Love About America
(A few of the items below are supported by the international community.)
1. The Grand Canyon
2. Freedom of religion;
3. The fact that almost anyone can write a song, record it, and post it online;
4. Supermarkets;
5. Our public education system, warts and all;
6. The way the New York Philharmonic plays behind the beat of the conductor. (How can such a large group of people be so connectedly, fiercely independent?);
7. Wrangler blue jeans;
8. The phone companies, past and present, who at this point have enabled pretty much every U.S. citizen to have some method of reaching every other person in the developed world. (While cost may be a barrier with some technology, with a little research, even a very poor person can phone Germany for pennies per minute -- Skype at the public library, anyone?);
9. The Mises Report, consistently and intelligently arguing for libertarian, "Austrian" economics;
10. The fact that on some forest trails, the Forest Service has installed a bench, roughly a quarter of a mile in;
11. The fact that after a half mile or so, the Forest Service leaves the trail untouched;
12. Jon Stewart and The Daily Show;
13. The fact that Americans have access to more health care modalities (Western, Eastern, and most everything in between) than any other citizens of the world;
14. Digital cameras, and all that goes with them;
15. The fact that I can open the Yellow Pages, look under "religion," and find ads for a Catholic church, a Jewish temple, a Protestant church, an Episcopalian church, a Muslim mosque, and on and on and on...and for the most part, we all let each other happen;
16. Off-Broadway;
17. Off-Off Broadway;
18. Big pharma, those much vilified companies which, in addition to their various evils, bring us Advil, aspirin, and hundreds of other drugs which improve our lives through the creative application of bio-chemistry;
19. Our organic farmers;
20. The enormous amount of food our non-organic farmers produce;
21. TV and movie content -- a portion of it -- in moderation;
22. The debate over whether or not violent video games are bad for us humans (I sense they are -- there are more healthy ways to express the violence inside of us);
23. Freedom of speech and of the press. "I hate Obama." See -- I'm still typing. It works. (I don't actually hate President Obama -- I was making a point about freedom of speech...);
24. The slow but steady progress toward green energy and green vehicles;
25. The network of roads, trucks and trucking companies which currently keeps our economy functioning (food in the stores, gas at the pumps, etc);
26. The wisdom and restraint our political and military leaders exercise, day after day, even as they possess the most awesome, potentially cataclysmic, apocalypse-making set of weapons systems ever devised by humankind;
27. The California redwoods;
28. NASA, for bringing humankind to the moon, and sending back all those cool pictures. Hubble rules!
29. Amazon.com, for making almost every book ever published available in a searchable database. The library at Alexandria: eat your heart out;
30. Print-on-demand, free blogs and web sites, YouTube and the like -- providing access to world-wide expression to anyone, and I mean *anyone.* Info-glut is a problem. Finding content worth ingesting is a problem. But was an incredibly narrow distribution channel choked by editors and advertisers a preferable system? Search on a keyword, and find text, images, and videos created by hundreds / thousands of people: famous, infamous, and unknown. Wow. Brought to you by:
31. Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and the tens of thousands of geniuses who design and build the technologies that allow YouTube et al to exist;
32. The 1,716 microbreweries we support (2010 figure);
33. Our political process. In the paraphrased words of Winston Churchill, "democracy is the worst form of government...except for all of the other ones."
34. The forty five cent stamp;
35. A gallon of reverse osmosis water for a quarter (although the fact that I need to buy drinking water because the ground water is polluted is a bummer);
36. Farmers' markets selling locally-grown produce;
37. The fact that we have 3,617,764 businesses with four employees or less (2008 figure);
38. Our public libraries;
39. The plethora of centers offering many different spiritual practices: tai chi, yoga, meditation of all stripes, and so on...
40. Graphic design, as it beautifies and makes more legible our visual environment;
41. The Tesla Electric Car Company;
42. The American Humane Society, taking care of our unwanted doggies and kitties;
43. My alma mater, an American university which gave me an unparalleled liberal arts education;
44. My school of meditation, located in the Southwest of the United States, guided by an (east) Indian master, which taught me how to go in;
45. Mike Rowe and "Dirty Jobs," a TV Show on the Discovery Channel;
46. The 304 locations of the Whole Foods Market (2011 figure);
47. The hundreds of charities and NGOs working to make our society a more caring place;
48. 101 different kinds of salsas, many made by Mom-'n-Pop businesses;
49. The fact that, if an individual has the moxy, s/he can reside in America and penetrate the veil of data-fluff, becoming conscious of what is.