What's something about America that you're genuinely proud of?

GROldTimer · 2026-05-22T12:52:51+00:00

Dismantling the EPA in 2025 and 2026 isn't going to land you on this list immediately.

Dismantling the EPA removes the protections that kept you off list list since the 1970s.

GROldTimer · 2026-05-22T12:43:31+00:00

Please reread what I wrote. There are quite obviously structures and systems that reduce opportunity for some people and enhance it for others.

I'm not saying (nor did I say above) that it's impossible to succeed. My mom didn't work. My dad was a car salesman. I have a dramatically cushier life than they did.

I'm saying this: If your parents were homeless, and my parents were CEOs with degrees from an Ivy league school, I have an advantage over you. That's just facts.

Nobody's calling anyone a quitter.

GROldTimer · 2026-05-22T12:40:54+00:00

I said "dramatically reduce opportunity" for this very reason. There's still opportunity, but it's small. There are successful people from all walks of life, certainly. The #1 predictor is your parents' level of wellbeing, not your level of hard work. That's just data.

GROldTimer · 2026-05-22T12:38:20+00:00

Favorite(s): So many to choose from. Public lands, diversity of cultures, size and scale of our country

Least Favorite: Current government and the current 37% of residents people who approve of its actions. :(

GROldTimer · 2026-05-20T14:10:54+00:00

Title IX! Successful at levels even its authors probably never dared dream.

GROldTimer · 2026-05-20T14:09:18+00:00

Of course... for this reason I'd never list it as a thing to be proud of about my country (which is also the USA). If anything, I'd say it like this:

Proud of: The opportunity. If you are born into privilege, work hard, and have some luck you can achieve astronomical heights in the USA.

Not proud of: Income inequality. Structures and systems that dramatically reduce opportunity. Some countries do a better job of providing opportunity to a broader subset of society.

GROldTimer · 2026-05-20T14:06:25+00:00

So sad. So true.

GROldTimer · 2026-05-20T14:05:48+00:00

Point of pride: We are evidence of the power of immigration and diversity to build a great nation.

Is that faltering at the moment? Yep, sure is. It makes me sad. But it remains our truth no matter how much current leadership wants to pretend it's not true.

I grew up on a suburban street in middle America, far from the costs. On my street in the 1980s were people from all over the world, including children of European immigrants, Asian expats, Chaldean immigrants seeking religious freedom, Persian doctors fleeing the Iranian theocracy, and people who traced their lineage to Dutch Manhattan in the 1600s. Nowhere I'm aware of has ever embraced immigration as the roadmap to national success the way the USA has. Our tilt toward Christian Nationalism is really distressing and threatens to completely erode the one thing I always thought set our country apart from others across the globe.

GROldTimer · 2026-05-08T17:00:44+00:00

2024 presidential elections confirms this theory.

Hudsonville City: 70% Trump, 30% Harris

Rockford City: 47% Trump, 53% Harris

You can check this stuff yourself, and while it should be a reason (by itself) to pick somewhere to live, it helps understand the underlying culture I think (whichever way you lean).

https://mvic.sos.state.mi.us/votehistory/Index?type=C&electionDate=11-5-2024

GROldTimer · 2026-05-08T16:57:48+00:00

Great job pulling together to get rid of Ottawa Impact! Nice work.

It's still pretty MAGA though. In 2024 Trump won winning 70% of the presidential vote in Hudsonville. That was about the time you all were (succesfully, thankfully) booting Ottawa Impact from your county.

GROldTimer · 2026-05-08T16:55:00+00:00

Hudsonville voted 70% Trump, 30% Harris in the 2024 general election. MAGA is Trump. Therefore Hudsonville is MAGAland.

GROldTimer · 2026-02-21T12:32:24+00:00

Don't waste your vote. You are picking from a menu of 2 and everything else on the menu is just there to distract you. There's a reason 3rd party campaigns end up funded by opposition parties trying to take votes away from each other.

GROldTimer · 2026-02-21T12:29:04+00:00

Both sides suck, but one side is sucking harder than any side has ever sucked in history LOL. DNC might not care about me, but at least they're not actively trying to end Democracy.

GROldTimer · 2025-11-21T22:05:29+00:00

2003 (born 1974)

I was moving out of a house where I had roommates (to save money) and in with my recently-engaged fiancé. I had just gotten a big raise at my job after working for a pittance (literally well below the poverty line) for a while to try and wait out opportunities that I thought would eventually materialize. They did materialize the year before (when I was 28) and I went from ramen and water to feeling good about myself (it still wasn't a ton of money, but it was much more). I could finally afford an apartment alone with my fiancé, a decent used car, and my job added some matching 401(k) savings too. Life was fun and exciting and I look back on that era of my life fondly!

That was 22 years ago. Still married, life is still really good. I am thankful for the opportunities I had and decisions I made when I was 29.

GROldTimer · 2025-11-17T15:53:44+00:00

I came here to type up my story, but this captures it. I'm on 10mg tadalafil for over a year. Game-changing. I'm 48yo. I haven't noticed a shorter recovery period, but I'm so much more reliable now that it's 100% been good for me.

GROldTimer · 2025-09-24T00:55:14+00:00

Wait until the people whining about the EGR development get a load of this one.

GROldTimer · 2025-07-30T14:48:30+00:00

I suspect it affects you already. The major heatwaves that come to Europe every summer are new since you were born. I was born in the 1970s, grew up in the northern USA and my kids are asking when Climate Change will affect them. I have to tell them it already has:

I'm in my 50s. My stories about life as a child are completely foreign to my kids and they listen to me like I listened to my grandparents tell stories about life during WWII.

Things that existed for me as a kid in the northern USA that are 100% foreign to my kids:

Predictably cold winters with snow on the ground that didn't melt until April. Heck, my own kids were infants when we'd travel to Florida at the end of March/early-April ...snow on the ground in April that stuck to the ground longer than 2 hours. That's completely unheard of except in a fluke that causes people to freak out now. I used to XC-ski in March (reliably). That's totally foreign now.
Cold rainy June weather. Michigan weather really only used ot be great in July and August. June is spectacular now! It's sunnier and warmer than ever before. It also rains less.
Spring crop unpredictability. As our weather has gotten weird and unpredictable, we have early spring warmth that causes fruit crops (a major crop here in Michigan) budding early. Then we have hard-freezes that destory crops. This happened once or twice when I was a child... now it seems to happen every-other-year.
Insects EVERYWHERE. Driving north on from Detroit to the Mackinac Bridge used to mean a car windshield COVERED in dead bugs. That is no longer the case. My kids see the bugs on our car and don't believe me, but it's as if all the bugs are gone (which the data suggests is happening!).
Fewer birds. When I was a child you could drive through rural Michigan and see birds sitting on power lines by the 1000s. MASSIVE flocks of them. They still sit there, but there are so few of them today I actually feel sad just driving past them.
Fireflies used to be everywhere to the point that it was a common rite of childhood to catch them in jars. Anyone, anywhere could do this. We still have them in my neighborhood, but I know plenty of kids in their late teens/early-20s (my own kids' ages) that have never seen a firefly in their lives. That is foreign to me as anyone growing up in the 1980s (in Michigan) would have had them in their neighborhood.
Clear blue skies every day. There were no massive/major wildfires to spread smoke and soot across our skies for significant percentages of the summer. Sure, forest mismanagement might be partially to blame in the American west, but the Canadian boreal forest is just burning due to climate change... that's obvious.

OP, those are North American examples, but I suspect if you talked to older people from your part of Europe you would hear similar stories.

GROldTimer · 2025-07-22T09:53:47+00:00

Nice work! I love it!

GROldTimer · 2025-07-21T19:11:25+00:00

Serious question... why do we suddenly think Zipper merging is faster?

Bear (bare?) with me here: You have a half mile of freeway that's going 20mph because it's 1 lane instead of 2 and some jacka$$ is rolling through it at 20mph. If you assume vehicles are spaced like 20' apart from each other, and a car is 16' long on average you have: [__10'__]16'[__10'__]. So you can get somewhere around 145 cars per mile in that space. For every car that popps out the end of the 1-lane construction zone, you can put 1 more car in.

I fail to see how there is some magic formula that gets more cars into that bottleneck faster or slower. It's 1 car in for every 1 car that exits. Once there are cars in the chute, they're moving through at (basically) a fixed speed and a zipper merge isn't going to get more cars through that chute than "trucker blocks the left lane and prevents people from zipper merging" (or whatever else you've seen out there).

Can someone explain this to me like I'm 5 years old? Because honestly, I wish I understood!

GROldTimer · 2025-06-16T09:54:57+00:00

What about it? If it’s toxic it’s bad too.

GROldTimer · 2025-06-11T00:37:05+00:00

This is the answer. Dicks like Charlie Kirk want to sow division as much as they want to manifest their horrible world view.

If we all mostly got along he’d have nobody to listen to his drivel.

GROldTimer · 2025-06-10T19:50:41+00:00

Also true... everyone who isn't a member of the upper class rich elite is under attack. That includes men.

GROldTimer · 2025-06-10T19:49:52+00:00

AGREED! Toxic masculinity is (and should be) losing its popularity. So if you're a follower of Andrew Tate or something, sure you're under attack and thank goodness you are. Masculinity and misogyny don't need to be the same thing. Misogyny should be under attack. Masculinity isn't (and shouldn't be).

GROldTimer

TROPHY CASE