There are places in the world that are worse than the rather sorry state of the United States of America these days. We have fallen far, but we are still no where near the bottom on this planet of ours.
There are at least twenty-two places that are clearly worse than most places in the United States, and that list isn't anywhere close to being comprehensive.
* We do not live in Russia where gangsters and oligarchs rule, unprovoked wars are fought, and alcoholism and suicide are so rampant that the life expectancy of men has plummeted.
* We do not live in Venezuela which is experiencing an economic melt down.
* We do not live in China which has capricious waves of crackdown on unpopular factions and propaganda talk out of Orwell's "1984", and minority populations on the fringes are treated little better than Jews in Nazi Germany.
* We do not live in Syria or Yemen which are currently in the midst of active civil wars with international dimensions that transform these wars in proxy wars of a kind not seen since the Cold War.
* We do not live in Saudi Arabia which is a vile theocratic monarchy.
* We do not live in Afghanistan which is in the midst of a slow burning civil war that has been interrupted only briefly since 1979.
* We do not live in South Sudan where bands of child soldiers bounce around a country that has never really found its stride.
* We do not live in South Sudan where bands of child soldiers bounce around a country that has never really found its stride.
* We do not live in North Korea where an emerging monarch arbitrarily executes people, starvation is rampant, and the entire outside world is shut out.
* We do not live in Northern Nigeria where underfed herders fight genocidal wars against marginal subsistence farmers and high school girls are kidnapped en masse and turned into sex slaves.
* We do not live in Uzbekistan where torture is the tool that is used to keep the masses under the leadership's thumb.
* We do not live in Myanmar where soldiers kill and rape and burn down villages of a Muslim minority with abandon.
* We do not live in the Philippines were a murderous thug fans indiscriminate violence and disasters routinely take great tolls on people's lives.
* We do not live in El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras, where gang violence and unchecked criminal activity have reached such epic proportions that people are fleeing the country as refugees.
* We do not live in Gaza where there are no resources, an embargo of the outside world, privation, oppression and sporadic military incursions, while local "democratic" leaders are often warlords and terrorists.
* We do not live in Botswana where development is woefully behind and more than 15% of the population has AID/HIV.
* We do not live in Somalia where warlord managed anarchy is still the rule, war driven famine is common place, and there is no legitimate government which can exercise meaningful control over the nation.
* We do not live in Botswana where development is woefully behind and more than 15% of the population has AID/HIV.
* We do not live in Somalia where warlord managed anarchy is still the rule, war driven famine is common place, and there is no legitimate government which can exercise meaningful control over the nation.
* We are close on the heels of Hungary and Poland in backing away from and dismantling democratic institutions, but we aren't quite there yet.
* We have a mixed set of economic signals, with falling unemployment but also falling real wages, with a trade war looming, but not yet in full bloom. But, we have not had to weather the economic collapse that struck Greece not so long ago.
We are no longer a shining beacon on a hill. We are no long the best place in the world to live. We have lost our leadership on so many fronts. But, we are far from the worst place in the world to live either.
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