What makes a "good" country?
A list of things to check off, if you want to live in a country you can be proud of.
It was Canada Day yesterday. I felt kind of sad, I’m not proud of Canada any longer. It’s been rotting from within, as it has absorbed so much of the “American way” - pay as you go, culture, the last 25 years or so. But it got me thinking again about what makes a “good” country.
I took down from my bookshelf, a treasured book, Notes from the Rainforest, by Gyorgy Faludy. Gyorgy is/was a mind like no other. He had traveled and lived all over the world and on one small page, he listed in one of his diary entries, his 10 requirements for a country to be “liveable”. If the country didn’t have at least 5 of them, he recommended running for the nearest border.
Here they are for your consideration. What do you think?
1. Freedom to leave without an exit visa or baggage search is assumed.
Yes. And now in Canada, if I travel home, I won’t be able to leave because I’m not vaccinated.
————-
2. Faces of the population are generally cheerful.
I love Latin America for this. Despite the poverty, people are always smiling, sharing a laugh, at ease in some way with something many are not.
————-
3. Public rudeness is rare.
Highly underrated. How we treat others reflects directly upon a place and if you’d like to live there. The public and the private do merge.
————-
4. Fairly elaborate manners are expected of everyone after the age of seven.
Culture is a process and makes the young prepared to live in society, as a member with rights and responsibilities. In many cases, places, this process has broken down.
————
5. Public libraries are uncensored, well-stocked, and much-used.
Libraries still are the headquarters of civilization. A measure of how a government values knowledge, education and a place where you are free to think, feel, question as you wish.
————
6. Little or no hunger or squalor is evident and the accumulation of wealth is not generally thought of as the Meaning of Life.
Wealth as a value of status is really a plague in Western societies. Just look at the British monarchy. Diffuses but yet we give them the time of day.
————
7. Violence is rare and , among the police, severely forbidden.
We’ve lost something with so much of policing being militarized, training police to attack first, control, restrain and ask questions/talk later. Sad.
————
8. A general attitude of “live and let live” is seen.
I want to live somewhere among people that can forgive. Who experience each day anew and who don’t prescribe to a Nietzschean sense of “ressentiment” - resentment.
————
9. No political prisoners are taken.
Julian Assange? Meng Wang Zhou? Felix Maradiaga? Guantanamo and the many black sites? Political prisoners are so much more common, even in alleged “social democracies”.
————
10. Few are destitute and those are charitably treated.
I’m just gobsmacked at the level of homelessness in the US, especially the Western USA. Appalling.
Faludy, Gyorgy., Notes from the rainforest. 1988, Hounslow Press, Willowdale, Canada.