Also, vacation time. The European Union requires all its member countries to grant their employees a minimum of 20 days paid vacation. In the USA, 10 days of paid vacation plus holidays (we have only 8) is considered good, and usually, those days INCLUDE our sick days. Out for a week with the flu or COVID in February? Congrats, you now have 5 days of vacation remaining for the rest of the year. Use them wisely-- or save them and take no vacation, because who knows if you'll get sick again and need them? Or if your child will need you at home for a day? Unpaid leave is something most of us simply cannot afford, and our government does not guarantee us ANY paid leave. None. Zero.
(Here's a chart that really pisses me off. Minimum annual leave by country. Do me a favor and scroll through until you find the United States, then ask yourself again why we "don't" travel.)
Speaking of what we can't afford, travel is expensive. We have no passenger rail to speak of, plane tickets to overseas (most places are functionally overseas from here, not all but most) cost an arm and a leg, and most people here are already struggling with the rising cost of living. Those of us who can travel, generally do travel, but we do not have any such thing as a weekend jaunt to Italy or a week at a cabin in Germany or whatever the fuck it is Europeans do for fun. International travel requires a plane ticket and half a day's travel or several days driving unless you're lucky enough to live by the border. If I want to go to Quebec, it's like $200 for a plane ticket and 13 hours for the cheapest flight because of layovers (wtf). Going to Copenhagen would cost around $450 and take only slightly less time than Quebec. Going to London would be about $700 with a deal through Icelandair, but if I wanna fly nonstop, that literally doubles the cost to more than $1,400. Either way, I'm in the air between 8 and 10 hours.
By comparison, a plane from Berlin to Rome would be about $200 and 4 hours. By train (assuming eurail.com is not lying to me), it would would take 19 hours and only cost around $51.
So, yeah, to anyone like the person in the notes going "Mmm, no, I think it's more that Americans just don't care :/ I've been to the US even though it was far :/ you could try harder if you actually cared :/" We aren't disinterested in what's happening with y'all. Travel is prohibitively expensive. Also, our international news reporting is as much of a joke as our rail infrastructure, and yeah A LOT of shit is extremely USA-centric and it's an enormous fucking problem, like, children in other countries thinking you call 911 in an emergency because that's what's on all the shows? Yikes! Very big yikes! But sneering at individual USAmericans for "not taking an interest" when the systems around us are structured in ways that artifically keep our attention and yours on the USA is, frankly, stupid. We're not disinterested, we're under-informed, exhausted, strapped for cash, and so focused on surviving that many of us don't have enough mental energy to spend on our neighbors the next town over. Many employers here straight up do not offer paid time off at all because-- again-- they aren't required to do so. Not most, but many. NO paid vacation days. NO paid holidays. NO paid sick days. NONE. (For my fellow USAmericans, I highly recommend clicking through to that chart I linked earlier. You have no idea how unusual that is, or how few 8 paid holidays is, in comparison to almost everywhere else.)
Again, those of us who can travel, generally do travel. It is not that we don't care or don't want to. The USAmericans who don't travel, don't travel BECAUSE THEY LITERALLY CANNOT, and that is a systemic issue, not an individual one. Our government has a specific financial interest in preventing us from learning how good other places have it, they do not care if we live or die, we're drowning in bills with no safety nets to catch us, and we have functionally NO PAID LEAVE, so I don't want to fucking hear it.
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