Top 10 Crazy Facts About America

Here's my perspective -- from 10,000 miles away.

1. The craziness about gun possession. Who'll explain to Americans that they're not pioneers anymore nor is the West wild. Guns make about as much sense as horse-drawn buggies for commuting to the office from Brooklyn to downtown Manhattan or riding a horse to the office in sprawling L.A.
2. The never-retiring justices of the Supreme Court. And what is it with them being so openly, politically partisan anyway? Overturning the popular vote in presidential elections, venturing into policy formulation ... let the folks retire at 70 or 75.
3. That reminds of the crazy election in 2000 when Al Gore got more votes than Bush -- but guess what! Bush wins because he got Florida and thus more votes in the crazy Electoral College, a relic of the 18th century. And those hanging chads appear anachronistic from the perspective of 3rd world nations. India uses EVMs !! Kill the Electoral College!
   
4. The student debt problem. The entrepreneurial skills of the top universities is something to admire of course. But why don't the parents pay for the education of their kids? Are the parents insane? Does the law in America say that you stop being a parent when your kid goes to college?
5. Which leads to the utterly shameless spectacle of news stories -- endless -- where we get to learn about how kids are returning to their parents' homes after college. Parents in America don't find it shameful to make a show of supporting their own kids -- as if they're doing a great service to humanity. I want to say to them: those are your kids! You don't get to stop being parents when the kids become 21 or 18 or whatever. Parents are parents ALWAYS -- till death. And kids are kids FOREVER. So, no more news stories about parents supporting jobless college graduate sons and daughters and neither any stories when old parents stay with their adult working children. This is NORMAL people. At least in India. This is NORMAL. End of story.
6. What's the craziness to do with drugs? May be one of those first world problems that we in the developed world are spared from. Though probably the drug grows near us, it is more in demand out in the West where the growers get more money so we in India don't get to see too much of the stuff. Of course, the rich are busy experimenting ... following in the footsteps of America as always.
7. So where are we in the women's liberation revolving door circus. First, there was the Victorian Age in England and old Europe from where America originated. Then slowly things became liberated in the early 20th century. The '60s saw some apparently revolutionary kind of changes. But still the issue can be a lightening rod as Richard Dawkins discovered last year. So what do American women want as of now ... circa 2012? It's easy to talk about men. Men like sex. That's that. Do women though still like to get as much sex as they can (like the men)? Or are they choosy and selective and look for the perfect combination of brains and handsomeness? Like the brains of Albert Einstein or Richard Feynman (or even Murray Gel-Mann or P.A.M. Dirac or Julian Schwinger) married with the handsomeness of Cary Grant (or Gregory Peck or Clark Gable or Tom Cruise)? And what about those virginity rings? American women aren't going to be wearing burqas after a while, are they? I am much thankful to the dynamics of free market economics which has responded to the demand-supply law of the market by creating a vibrant pornographic movie business. Long Live America (and California)!
8. What's it with Jesus? Why so crazy? Why can't people grow up and realize that we'll all be dead soon and that will be THAT! Is that so tough to swallow? Be a man! Or a woman! So far so many have died right? And the world goes on surviving, does it not? Whoever your heroes might be from the pages of history are all dead, are they not? So we'll be as well. Read up some guys! You're all literate, aren't you? It's not like all the knowledge (or most of it) is stored in a second language which you have to learn to access the knowledge ... which is the case for many of us out there in the wider world outside America. How tough can it be to read up a bit of popular science about quantum mechanics or astronomy? We're lucky to have had folks like Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking and Steven Weinberg and Carl Sagan and Neil Tyson and Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and ... well, you can add to the list in the comments below. Or just read up any quotations by famous people and I bet that you'll find about 99 out of 100 great thinkers tend to be atheists. Time to grow up and ditch Jesus and become fully atheist. Like the Hitch said, we're all atheists anyhow about other people's religions, aren't we? Okay, I will get off my hobby horse now.
9. Why the obsession with having perfect teeth? Or a perfect, ageless body? Well, I guess as long as you have the money, no problem splurging on cosmetic dentistry or Botox or breast enhancements or whatever. Anyway, if ever we're going to be immortal, it will be courtesy science and not New Age charlatans like Deepak Chopra.
10. The Good Crazy Habits: everyone trying to be millionaires and billionaires, jumping from airplanes, SETI, becoming tourists in space, trying to go to Mars, writing and reading science fiction that talks about time spans of billions of years, building space telescopes, developing theories of the Big Bang, simulating the collision between the Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy 2 billion years from now, finding out that the Sun will be dead in just another 5 billion years, the list goes on. All good. Keep it up. But please don't worry about getting abducted (and experimented upon) by aliens. And evolution did indeed occur. No, the Earth and the Universe was not created 6,000 years ago. Dinosaurs did walk the Earth. Get over it.

I will stop here. I have limited knowledge about America because of being located 10,000 miles away or something. Oh wait, thanks to Google Earth, I can roam all across the Whole Earth from the comfort of my desk. And there's Google Mars too.

America rocks! And that too without mentioning the Bill of Rights or the Boss or the King.

Feel free to add your own crazy items as you seem them or to criticize my choices in the comments below.