Let me make a nice blanket statement here: Europe is not better than the United States.
As I’m sure many of you already know, attempting to rank countries by some metric of “goodness” is about as foolhardy and without traction as trying to catch rain. Unfortunately, since I first began attempting to form complex opinions, I have tried to do so.
I was that kid in high school, the one with thick glasses and a Lost Generation novel tucked under his arm, convinced not only that “this town” held nothing for me but also that my adolescent angst represented some moral degradation in American culture as a whole.
I can’t confess that I improved much in college. I continued to appropriate the best progressivism of the Old Continent into my worldview: “If only we cared as much about the environment as Scandinavia!” or “Why is it that women in the workplace are treated so much better in France?” or “Boston goes to sleep Puritanically early — if only it was more like Spain.”
My frame of reference had evolved to such: absorption of misrepresented facts during those intellectually formative years, youthful liberalism manifested as a belief that somewhere else had to do it better than us and a typically northeastern-urban admiration of cosmopolitanism.
Granted, my three months in Paris have been short, so I am no cultural expert. But from what I have seen and experienced, I can safely say: I was wrong.
Europe is not an overwhelmingly better place than America.
The United States is full of latent racism and sexism. Such ideas have a heavy hand in dominating our policing or contributing to workplace uquity between genders — the United States ranks 65th globally in wage equality, according to an annual report released in October by the World Economic Forum.
I had believed Europe was infinitely better for women, yet I know personally three young women who have been followed by men late at night and two who have been overtly groped on the metro. Close to every female in my program has been whistled or jeered at on the street. Think what you will about those catcall videos that are making a round on the Internet, but this strikes me as a bit more widespread and a bit more intense.
A French film titled “Qu’est-ce Qu’on a Fait au Bon Dieu” (the version released in the United Kingdom was changed to “Serial (Bad) Weddings,” though I much prefer the directly translated “What Have We Done to God?”) saw significant popularity here with more than 12 million box office sales.
The film lightheartedly deals with, as my professor called it, “everyday racism.” A well-to-do Catholic couple is distraught that their first three daughters married a Chinese man, a Jewish man and a Muslim man, but they find hope in their youngest daughter who announces her engagement to a good Catholic boy named Charles… except he’s black.
Eventually, in either heartwarming or gag-inducing fashion, depending on whom you ask, the parents see the errors of their ways and accept people from all walks of life, perhaps teaching the audience that racism is bad and everyone matters.
Yet we, as the audience, are made by all efforts to sympathize with the protagonist as if his racism was an honest mistake from a bumbling husband. Somehow, the film drags us slowly along the upper-class white man’s journey to accepting all of his racially diverse in-laws without ever portraying those in-laws as anything other than a Jewish man full of get-rich-quick ideas or an African father who does his best warlord impression as he barks orders to his wife and children.
Comedy, of course, is almost never politically correct, and I have no problem with that, but it must be universally irreverent and sufficiently absurd to avoid complete tone-deafness — watch “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” for a good example. One cannot walk the middle ground between sympathy and satire without overlooking some key problem.
I was wrong for expecting every French film to be progressive, and that is by all means my fault, not the fault of the country. But this is an example of how my young idealism was refuted in practice.
Another example: In May 2013, France nationally legalized same-sex marriage — something the United States has yet to do. Cue criticism from younger Chris.
And yet on Oct. 5, I witnessed a massive rally just around the corner from my homestay. Somewhere between 70,000 people — the police estimate — and 500,000 people — the organizers’ estimate — gathered on the streets of Paris to protest that law almost 18 months after its passage. They also opposed surrogate pregnancy, which is currently illegal in France, and in-vitro fertilization.
By my translation, they shouted slogans such as “No gender ideology in schools!” and “Protect the family!” In what I assume is a rebuttal of rainbow flags and banners, the campaign uses the traditional boy-and-girl colors of blue and pink.
And this was not in a quiet, traditional village in the French countryside, far from the changing world. This was the kind of fear-mongering I expected from the Tea Party, but it was here in Paris, the heart of so much art and culture and forward-thinking that I had cherished.
Of course, it is not in any way indicative of France as a whole — an IFOP poll from the same day as the rally found that 57 percent of French citizens do not support repealing the law granting marriage rights to all — and there is always the value of free speech.
What the rally showed me, though, is that Europe is not above us in every way imaginable. People of all kinds live in all areas, but can you imagine tens of thousands of people marching down the streets of Boston or New York or Chicago demanding that rights be taken away from a demographic group?
I was foolish — even idiotic — to assume that Europe “has it all figured out.”
Idealizing anything, from a political platform to love to the character of your favorite author (or columnist), is anywhere between naïve and dangerous. It is from intense over-idealization — among many other factors — that we get the kind of nationalism that sparked two world wars.
So, from here on out, I will try to avoid putting any place on a pedestal. Europe is a fantastic place that does quite a few things better than America does, but nothing is perfect.
And hey, we don’t do it so badly in America. The problems are there for everyone to see, and I’ll gladly criticize them, but if you take a step back and then look, we’re not completely the sloppy, idiotic barbarians that 17-year-old Chris once thought.
Though seriously, can we nationalize paid maternity leave yet?
