While I think I can understand many of your feelings about US culture, I'm a bit lost here. I was married to a US citizen and have lived a significant amount of time there, although never settled permanently. But I never experienced any of these things, nor felt an overwhelming need to worry about them. Is it something about your chosen lifestyle?
(For context, I have also lived and worked in a place where many of my neighbours employed armed guards to sit at their gates. And I watched from my office window as an armed bank robbery took place across the way. It ended with corpses lying in the street. And I was far more worried when dealing with police there than in any of my several US interactions with them. Think the US is bad? Well, in some ways it is... but it could be a lot worse.)
Your experience is not everyones experience. For example, the country you describe has 0% resemblance to the one I know. Why should your experience matter more than mine?
Are you actually proposing that your experiences are in some way typical ?
Edit to add: everyone says they never noticed it while living there. They only noticed it after the first few months/years when it was no longer present.
As someone that has lived in a police state before, I can't tell you that your feelings in the US aren't valid. They are yours alone. But perhaps travel somewhere were actual security forces search you randomly, harass you for no reason, etc. Experiences I have never had in the US, not once.
> Main thing I notice is the fear I sense in people whenever cops are nearby, and definitely the sense of this security state hovering over everyone
You should know what that feels like, when it actually occurs. Similarly when someone rushes to declare their country has become "Nazi Germany", they ought to read a history book or two.
(This isn't just a skin color thing, even white people in America have such diverse in-cultures that it feels bizarre to speak to some of them. Go down five houses in a richer white neighborhood and you will not typically find neighbors that share really common understanding among one another.)
> A big part of American fear is knowing that nearly every single person you interact with that isn't a friend of yours doesn't really consider you their "people".
The other side of this coin: America actually accepts people from other places. Most of the world will always see you as foreign if you come from abroad, even if you have lived there your whole life.
The American ideal is now a civic society that's not predicated on the idea of having a "people" who the nation-state is created for. Citizens still often think that they have a "people", but that delineation does not extend to all Americans. As an example a second-gen Mexican person is not particularly likely to consider me part of their "clan" even though we are both American. When everyone's foreign, no one is.
Not been my experience in NYC and other places. Quite the opposite. Also have you seen European integration of foreigners up close? Middle East? Asia?
My guess is no, because these places make it far more difficult to assimilate (if not impossible)
I suspect we're disagreeing over what it means to "assimilate" or "be accepted as" one of an ethnic group. Imagine a stirring speech where a speaker says "I have dreamed of a respite from the trials our people have undergone". When the audience hears "our people", they are going to think of a certain group that they imagine themselves belonging to. In America, a miniscule fraction of the population thinks of "everyone who is legally an American" when they hear the phrase "our people".
However, some other place like Paris, the massive city-state of the white Franks, has a carefully guarded culture that they gatekeep as a majority ethnic group. You can live in France, and you can speak French, but you can't "become French" because many of the people who call themselves "French" think specifically of white Frankish/Gaulish/Roman descendents. That's just not happening in major American cities.
So, ghettos. I'm not saying there's not a "little Italy" in most American cities, but a Turkish person living in Germany their whole life is still Turkish. American in Japan, same. These places don't even allow the possibility of assimilation.
Or as my English friend put it, "there's a difference between tolerance and acceptance."
So your selection bias includes only people that have made the decision to leave. Do you not see the issue ?
Even if you didn't select into people who left presumably for a reason, this is still an anecdote. It's your opinion, your reality. It's not shared.
For example, I have an anecdote of living in the EU. It's cloudy 10 months out of the year, everywhere except in the south. No one told me that. Winters were harsh. Foreigners in general were not accepted, most social interactions were with other ex-pats. Salary was much lower and that limited my ability to buy property and save for retirement.
I could go on. But what I wouldn't do is broadcast all of this as if it's some kind of universal truth. It's just my experience.
Are you quite sure you're not misremembering an action movie for your own experiences? Living in America is not even remotely this exciting for most people. T-boned in intersections not just by a truck, but multiple trucks? Shootouts on the highway and knife fights with bums? Are you Neo from the Matrix?
I still have family there and still visit for nearly a month out of the year. The number of people running red lights has gone up significantly the last few visits. To the point where I feel like I’m driving in Bali and not the US. People are more rude now than they used to be, and scared.
It took months after moving here to brush off the fear you have living in the US. Fear of the government taking your kid because your neighbor gets pissed off, fear of car accidents, fear of getting pulled over, fear of getting stabbed/shot while walking down the street, fear of seeing someone else getting stabbed/shot, fear of getting fired for no reason, fear of going to the hospital or getting seriously sick because even if you survive, you’re going to be broke af.
I’ve had cops plant evidence in my car, I’ve been hit by trucks running red lights, I’ve gotten in a knife fight with a hobo, I’ve been shot at on the highway, I’ve been fired for no reason, I’ve gotten in a motorcycle accident that fucked me over seven ways to Sunday.
I haven’t had to worry about any of those things since leaving. Not a one.