Quick Hits 5: Photo Dump, and The American Nightmare
Home at last...
After over a month on the road, I’m finally back at RRR headquarters in CT:
I’m sorry for the brief hiatus last week. I was optimistic I could carve out the necessary time to publish a full edition of RRR, but truthfully, I never stood a chance.
From London to Barcelona, back to London, to Newark airport to Philadelphia, to the Philly suburbs back to Philly and ultimately winding up in Connecticut as of late Friday night, the travel schedule had other plans for me 😪. My goodness, I was tired.
Thankfully, I’ve had a couple of phenomenal days since returning home. I’ve been getting back into shape, organizing myself, capturing some moments of inspiration, and reconnecting with family and friends.
Today, I’ll be extremely brief. I want to share some favorite sights from my travels, followed by a little commentary on a piece of writing that couldn’t have come at a better time for me personally.
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London
Barcelona
Philadelphia
All beautiful places, all incredibly different in their respective ways, and yet, people everywhere I’ve been have such commonalities. We have much more that unites us than makes us different. Story for another day I suppose 🤷🏻♂️.
The Way We Live In The United States Is Not Normal by
The last week that I was in London, I began formulating ideas about what elements of this foreign land I would bring back to the U.S., if I could. During that moment, this brilliant piece of writing came flying into my email inbox and seemed to give a voice to the noise that was in my head.
On friendships in U.S. cities:
In October 2019, Robert and I spent a month in Trieste, Italy, while he worked on an article for National Geographic featuring the storied Northern Italian port city.
I was extremely burnt out. I was in the thick of it at CNN, coming off two years of utter insanity in the US political world. It was exhausting and also frightening to contemplate what was becoming of the US.
On a more personal level, I was frustrated by the lack of meaningful friendships in Washington, DC, where we live. Everyone was hyper-busy, overworked, and stretched so thin that it was hard to find the energy and the time to have the kind of regular, causal connection that used to be commonplace, even in cities.
While in Trieste, I signed up to take one-on-one Pilates classes from an Italian woman in her late 30s. As I shared my frustrations about life in America, particularly how lonely it could feel, she asked me how often I saw my friends. "About once a week," I said, even though as I said it, I realized it was much less.
She was shocked. "This is not normal," she said. "I see my friends every day." She explained that when she left that evening, she would stop to see her friends as she walked home—a glass of wine with one, perhaps dinner with another.
None of this was planned in advance.
If you showed up at someone's house in Washington, DC, unannounced, you would be considered a sociopath. I am not exaggerating. Perhaps you could do this once, but if you did it more than once, people would think you were a problem.
In major US cities (where I’ve spent my adult life), getting time on the calendar to get together with friends resembles something akin to scheduling a space shuttle launch.
On medical care:
A few days before we flew back to the U.S. from Italy, we saw our friends Frances and Ed for dinner. I was not much fun, as I had I developed a throbbing pain in my jaw. I found out when I got home a few days later that I needed a root canal and was unceremoniously handed a bill for $5000. It would be hard to overstate my shock. Insurance didn't cover this, so I had to pay out of pocket.
This was a big financial hit, and I was well paid. How could the average person afford this? They can't, which is why so many people get trapped in medical debt after being forced to put critical care on a credit card.
Ed told me later that he had the best root canal of his life in Italy, costing $500. On our most recent visit to Puglia, we met a very successful Italian dentist at a dinner party, and he said he would charge around 250 Euros for that service. I have heard many stories like this about other types of medical care in Italy.
There is no reason there should be such a wide discrepancy between prices for the same service in Italy and the United States. The same is true of health insurance—I could buy a year's worth of health insurance in Italy that would be lower than my monthly premium in the United States.
On hyper-capitalist culture:
Because everything is so expensive and our hyper-capitalist culture tells you your value and happiness are derived from your level of career accomplishment and acquisition of material goods, it starts to almost make sense that people would work so hard to achieve this identity for themselves.
Even if a person is enlightened enough to reject the consumerist rat race, they still live in a country with almost no social safety net and a Hunger Games mentality, which means they are going to have to work a lot just to survive, especially because the days of jobs with great benefits from pensions to health care are pretty much over. (Again, the lack of decency).
Now I should state for the record, I am a believer in the potential of the U.S.
Not only the potential, but there are pieces of American realities and culture that are genuinely awesome.
And, I do think the viewpoints shared in this piece are clearly a result of a concentrated dose of these negative elements of American society that proliferate unencumbered in major cities on the east coast (which the author eludes to multiple times).
But… it’s hard to argue with any of the points being made.
I was joking with a friend last week that if you cut me, Budweiser foam would come oozing from my veins by virtue of how American I am. And yet, I truthfully am a bit disgusted as I struggle to deal with some of the harsh realities of my country.
The fact of the matter is that our system is broken. Maybe it’s been broken for a long time.
Mainly, we have to figure out a way to make the economy work for a much larger swath of the population. The cost of everything is completely, absolutely, indisputably, out of f***ing control.
The cost of child care, the cost of healthy food, the cost of housing, the cost of traveling to and from work, the cost of healthcare… it’s all nothing short of insane when you consider the average American annual income is somewhere well short of $50K a year.
Even the opportunity cost of not making money at any given second (not sure there’s an official calculation for that) feels like it couldn’t possibly be higher!
The worst part is, I’m not sure that everyone realizes how dire the situation is. When you’ve been living in the midst of something, where the changes (and in this case gradual worsening of conditions) happens slowly over time, it’s hard to step back and notice the absurdities taking place 😞😓😔.
That’s it for now, folks. To end things on a lighter note, I hope you all enjoy a fantastic holiday period filled with family, friends, and genuinely good times. The world is a crazy place, but many of us have a lot to be thankful for. Don’t forget to reflect on that!
Some songs I’ve been enjoying recently 🔊🎶🎧🕺🏻: