- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
No. 10: Let's start out with something simple, but annoying and offensive: tipping. We are the only country where you must tip your bartender, your waiter, your hairdresser and so on, or you become excommunicated from society. Shouldn't the employer be paying their workers rather than the customer?
It's all right - charge me more for my food so you can pay your waitress more than $4 per hour. It will save me the trouble of calculating the tip. As an added bonus, I also won't need to worry about a worker spitting in my food next time if the tip wasn't what he or she expected. Another problem with tipping is that it encourages the server to get rid of you as fast as possible so he or she can get more tips from the next costumers that come in. The tipping culture really sucks.
No. 9 is that many Americans are cocky and arrogant because we are secluded. Most Americans don't ever leave the country and experience other cultures. It makes sense considering everything most people need - from snowy mountaintops to sandy beaches - America has. However, this endowment has created a nation with many arrogant people that are oblivious to the rest of the world. One cannot say the United States is the greatest country of all if he or she has never experienced another country.No. 8 on my list of the top 10 reasons why America sucks draws from the last two presidential elections - there has not been a proper candidate for president since Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan.
Public speaking is the most important skill for a president or prime minister and no candidate for president since Clinton has possessed that talent. Watch Tony Blair and you will see how a suitable world leader always speaks eloquently - on the fly or during a written speech - to deliver a powerful message to hundreds of millions of people without confusion. President George W. Bush, Sen. John Kerry and former Vice President Al Gore all speak like drunken bums compared to Blair.
No. 7 is that there are too many rural people who are overrepresented. First of all, I believe that most rural people of America are less sophisticated and possess more of the arrogance discussed in number nine. The part that sucks the most is that these people have more representation than the people of more densely populated states like Connecticut.
Don't believe me? Consider this -Wyoming has three electoral votes for its two senators and one representative. If you divide Wyoming's three votes by its small, rural population of 501,242, you get about .000006 electoral votes per person. That may seem like nothing, but do the same math for Connecticut citizens and you get .000002 electoral votes per person.
Basically, citizens of Wyoming have three times more voting power than us in Connecticut. All the rural states like the Dakotas and Nebraska have the same electoral advantage over densely populated, liberal states like Connecticut and Massachusetts. From this inequality it can be seen precisely why Bush won the Electoral College, but not the popular vote in 2000 - the rural, Bush-loving segment of the population has more voting power.
And finally for this week, the No. 6 reason: Americans work too hard and do not know how to relax. Economists may praise the work productivity of Americans, but from a medical perspective, it is not healthy for workers to be pushed so hard. There needs to be some government intervention.
Bosses should not demand 80-hour weeks, should not be sending my dad or yours e-mails on his PDA at 11 p.m. or requiring him to wake up for a conference call to Asia at 3 a.m. This stressful lifestyle results in a population that doesn't know how to relax. Even on vacation, many Americans do not know how to relax and must always be doing something rather than sitting and talking at a café, or as I call it, "euro-sitting."
Well my friends, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but it looks like you will have to wait until next week to find out the top five reasons why our country sucks. I hope you are as excited as I am and want to find ways to better America by knowing our weaknesses. Don't take it personally. Every country sucks in one way or another...or 10.