Dirty In America

article = none , personal experience

I have a friend who married an american girl and moved to the USA , to Texas , actually. Chatted on the phone with him last night and he said some rather interesting things.

He works in the American Education system in a high school down there, and he reports that the american education system is a failure. People don't learn much down there at all. You cannot talk to them about anything "intellectual" like history (he's big on cowboy's and us/ mexican history).

That the americans don't even know much about their own country, let alone any other countries in the world, unless they're currently at war with them and they get mentioned in the papers every day.

He has a boy, and he follows that boy around , "sticks to him like glue" he describes it. But the other parents, mostly mexican (they are on the mexican border) don't watch their children. And every other day you read in the papers about some kid getting run over in his own drive way.

He describes the downtown core of El Paso as dirty , ugly , nothing but strip malls, and those strip malls have nothing but chinese run dollar stores selling stuff that breaks before you even take it out of the store (one presumes there's a few other stores and it's not 100% dollar stores).

They're constantly reading about drug gangs in mexico , which you can walk to in like 5 hours, and the city next to them on the other side of the us / mexico border is literally a war zone that makes iraq look tame.

Apparently , in "the next town over" , they read all the time about people getting kidnapped by mexican criminals and being held for ransom for a few thousand dollars.

His wife is a "rabid republican" which apparently means she hates "socialism" , which tends to mean free health care , free education , etc etc. One has to wonder about her views on santa clause *grins*

I'm gonna see if I can get him to be a "guest poster" and give the american point of view , or maybe the Canadian Lost In America point of view ...