By Robert Dean
Carter County Times
I’m in Barcelona for work this week, and everyone wants to talk about Trump. Last week it was Dublin, before that London. We’ve cut up chatting about music, hoisting drinks as musicians ripped through traditional ballads in Ireland, but the conversation always comes back to the same thing: “We used to look up to America.”
I met a guy who played the market in the Cobblestone in Dublin; he told me he was appalled at how the bond market was doing in between traditional Irish music. I met French folks in London who said they were scared to visit the U.S. because they didn’t know what would happen to them on our soil. And once my south side of Chicago accent comes out here in Barcelona, I have been asked what it’s like to live “there” – as if being an American is now a soiled enterprise.
For many of you, you’ll shrug: what does a snail-eating Frenchman matter? Or who cares what they believe in England? And for the most part, that assumption is correct; who cares? But it does tarnish the caveat, the cool of being an American, that the whole world is looking at us in revulsion. If you had to ask most folks, they’d rather have more friends than enemies, but lately, it feels like we cheer the opposite.
I haven’t seen rampant homelessness. I haven’t seen people complaining about going to the doctor because, for the most part, it’s free over here. And before you come at me with speculation on country size, yadda, yadda, none of these countries are financing two wars for other countries to feed a brutal machine that spits people out. I don’t know who I’ll meet next while over here. But when I tell them I’m a journalist, everyone has something to say to me. I’ve heard, “I love Americans. I hate your government.”
And you know what? That’s how most of us feel, too.
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