It’ll hurt a lot less if you stop expecting non-Americans to love everything American as much as Americans do.

Don’t get me wrong. Without a doubt, USA is the world’s favorite country, and at the moment, followed closely by Ukraine. We love a lot of the things that are profoundly American; we incorporate America into our everyday lives, gladly, willingly, with adoration of your beautiful nation.

That said, we don’t love everything about it. There are stuff that we downright hate. The Imperial System is dumb as hell, for instance. That’s feet, inches, pounds, and whatever horses asses you use to measure your stuff with… (Horses asses? Yeah, the width of your railways.) It sounds so… Uh. It’s… Infuriating you keep talking about literal sticks and stones when you measure stuff. For the rest of the world that has already moved on to the Metric System approximately two centuries ago, it’s a bit much to take.

We don’t much like your spelling system, either, in countries where spelling is logical and consistent, but hey – it works up to a point.

Collectively, we hate your obsession with guns. We find it difficult to understand the logic of connecting guns with safety. You have a love affair with a tool designed specifically for killing people, and you figure that’s a safety thing. We just don’t get it. Can’t you just freaking trust each other?!

To be fair, in spirit with me, there was one guy who went silent for a while and then explained that us guys bond over guns; it’s a social thing. He meant hunting mainly, and I get it. That was THE BEST explanation I’ve ever heard for gun ownership, but I figured maybe wrestling and kickboxing for the next generation would do just as well? (I also like to quip that we don’t like guns because it skews the natural dominance system; any pussy can pull a trigger. A knife fight is fought at less than an arm’s length like real men do.)

We tend to be critical of US’s need to police the world like they owned the whole damned planet, but having said that, when in a bind, any nation would welcome US’s help (cue: Ukraine).

Currently, we are not entirely happy over the woke culture’s absolute BS spilling all over the world, making our teens and tweens sick with this trans ideology, too; we don’t really like that. We know you’re just as fed up with it unless you’re the ones dishing it out on TikTok… But it’s an American thing, as it seems like, and… We wish it wasn’t there.

American version of feminism has also taken a whole new level, but luckily, your feminists have now moved over to defending men’s right to have a vagina and vice versa… Our feminists are pushing to ban trans medications from children, if they haven’t succeeded yet. They’ve left men rightfully alone as there’s not much left to blame them for, so… Good things and bad things. Now it’s just American movies spewing a feminist idea like it was still 1950’s, or some fantasy idea of a woman with superfeminine strength giving this idea that if a woman can’t beat up a guy within an inch of his life, she should probably die in shame or something. It’s ridiculous. Feeble ladies beat up multiple sturdy grown men all the time on screen… Uh, is that wise?

We’re not crazy about the fact you seem to think your shit doesn’t stink, as in it is the same thing to publish a random blog post in America as it is over here. You don’t pay attention to what some random French blogger is saying, so you assume French people don’t pay attention to what you’re blogging about, either. That’s naivety.

We don’t appreciate your tendency to validate other nations’ greatest thinkers’ and scientists’ worth by their ability to speak perfect American English. Having said that, Bible Belt American English sounds dumb as to us, too.

And we certainly don’t appreciate it when you travel in your massive tourist busses and load a bunch of severely over-weight entitled first-timers off to a potentially sacred sightseeing spot that you seem to think exists purely for your entertainment. Only Asians measure up to the annoyance factor there, as they swarm these places, pose in front of the sight without even turning to look at it directly for a few photos that they can show to their friends and family at home, and then locust their way back to a bus making a horrible noise doing it all. These people are supposed to be zen as fuck, but where’s the zen in that?

We DO UNDERSTAND that you’re not all the same, that the Bible Belt couldn’t be more different than the coasts, and all that, but fuuuuuk it would be nice if you understood that being Belgian is not the same thing as being… hmm… German or Italian. And that if I am from Finland, Europe, it doesn’t mean I know your friend from Spain, Europe. And, perhaps, that there ARE cool people outside English-speaking countries, even though I understand language barriers 100%. Just know, in theory, that the fact you can’t understand them doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be worth listening to if you could understand them. (Second Life real-time translators are quite the thing if you just got curious. You don’t need one; people who don’t speak English often have one installed. They’re amazing. You forget they don’t speak English.)

There are a lot of cool things that we non-Americans do that you don’t have the attention span for, which is understandable. There are a lot of countries and a lot of cultures, we are as varied as there are countries in the world, but it would be nice if you KNEW you don’t have all the answers or that you don’t do ALL POSSIBLE cool things right in your own country. I am not, personally, the least bit offended you don’t know the first thing about my home country, but I do find it offensive you assume it’s communist because it’s not America.

What is also irritating is your belief that Americans invented this thing called “freedom” and that “freedom of speech” is a purely American concept. It is not. In my country, we still get to swear and talk about sex in public media without getting censored (really hard doing either on American-owned platforms). Imagine that! We also get to walk around freely, wear what we want to wear, and expect not to be beaten up by the police because we look a bit dodgy… We expect to be arrested without violence and receive a fair trial if we do potentially face jail time. We also assume we won’t be beaten to death by prison guards if they feel like it in most parts of the world, even if there’s still work to be done even in countries like Australia where that shouldn’t be an issue anymore, but is. We don’t take those things as “just the way things are” in most parts of the world, and that’s something to be proud of, at least.

This is not so much annoying as it is surprising that you find it genuinely surprising how much we know about America even without ever having been there. I imagine my YouTube front page looks very similar to yours, and our Netflix is filled with the same shows (plus some international stuff), and our TV used to show the same McGyvers and Night Riders and X-Files as yours. The music we listen to is the same as yours, plus some international gems, but we couldn’t avoid American influence even if we wanted to. Most of us know more about American politics than we know about our own country’s. We know your laws almost as well as those of our own country, even if most of this knowledge comes from American movies and TV series, many of which are subtitled rather than dubbed, giving us a perfect opportunity to learn English from when we’re very young. We know the sizes of your pizzas and probably the calories they contain better than you do… by the looks of things… and there aren’t many things that would come as a complete surprise to a traveler – except every surprise that comes up because we really wouldn’t expect many.  Your culture is very, very well known, even if there are aspects of it that do not get as much coverage than others; it always astonishes me when I see videos of American wilderness and how GREEN it actually is, and the reaction I get is almost like “What is this shit? They don’t get to have all that gorgeous wilderness on top of their awesome cities, too; this is SO UNFAIR!” Given the emphasis on global warming, we associate the drama with America, considering it’s not our country that looks like an old, dried-up prune… But it’s also not America.

Last but not least… Give that racist bs a rest already. You’re not racist anymore. Haven’t been in a long time. People just like hanging out with people who they have a natural understanding of, that’s all.

Subscribe to get a Daily Message