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All cultures have cultural problems.

The U.S. has very severe cultural problems. The U.S. has the highest divorce rate in the world. The U.S. has the highest percentage of obese people. When someone habitually overeats, it is an indication of unhappiness, so the obesity is an indicator of widespread unhappiness.   

The U.S. has the highest percentage of its citizens in prison of any country ever, in the history of the world. Here are the official December 31, 2000 prison statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice [usdoj.gov]:

The total population of the United States [census.gov], projected to September 24, 2001 at 6:34:55 PM PDT is 285,218,008. Therefore, 2.3 percent of the entire U.S. population is in prison or involved with the criminal justice system. But remember, many of those are babies or children. About 3.1 percent of all adult U.S. citizens are in prison, jail, or on probation or parole.

An April 20, 2000 ABC News article, U.S. Prison Population Rising [abcnews.go.com], says that the percentage of growth of the U.S. prison population is rising.

The U.S. has about 6 times the percentage of its citizens in prison or jail as the European countries. Anyone who is interested may do a Google search for the percentage of citizens in prison in other countries. For example, a Google search on "prison statistics England" [google.com] gave Home Office Research Development Statistics [homeoffice.gov.uk] as the first link. Under the heading "Monthly Prison Population Brief, England and Wales", it says "Latest edition". This last link is an Adobe Acrobat PDF file. Click on it only if you are willing to wait for an entire document to be transferred to your computer. The document says that the total United Kingdom prison population is 67,090 on July 31, 2001. According to the U.K. government, the total population of the U.K. [gov.uk] is 58,246,000. The U.K. has only 0.11 percent of its population actually in prison or in jail. The U.S. total in jail or prison, from above, is 1,933,503. Therefore the United States has about 6 times the percentage of its citizens in prison or jail, 0.68 percent, as the U.K.

Prisons in the U.S. are often extremely inhumane. For example, the U.S. has what it calls Supermax prisons [spunk.org]. Read one prisoner's story: Supermax Prison is Torture and Death [tele.dk]. This is not obscure data. I learned about U.S. prisons from a PBS TV program, and have seen numerous articles about them. The two links in this paragraph are just the 2nd and 4th links from a Google search on "supermax prison".

A faculty member at the University at Buffalo, Michael I. Niman, has written an interesting article about the prison problem in the United States. The article, Incarceration Nation: The US is the World's Leading Jailer [mediastudy.com] discusses how cuts in education budgets, so that there can be more money to build prisons, cause a social situation in which there will be more prisoners. There is in the U.S. a "prison lobby" which tries to influence the local, state, and federal governments to give more money for prisons. These are people who make money by building prisons.

There is other evidence of social breakdown in the United States: An August 19, 1998 BBC News article, The United States of murder [bbc.co.uk], says that the city with the highest murder rate, Washington, D.C., has a murder rate 170 times higher than the city with the lowest murder rate, Brussels, Belgium. The 9 U.S. cities in this study of murder rates all were in the list of the 12 cities with the highest murder rate.

The U.S. is a nation of extremes. In many ways, the U.S. is the best.    The microprocessor was invented in the United States. Most of the technologies that created the Internet were originated in the United States, as was the idea of making the Internet a public utility. (The Internet was originally a private technology. Vint Cerf, who some people call "the father of the Internet", told the author of this book in a private communication that former U.S. presidential candidate Al Gore played a major role in getting government funding to bring the Internet to everyone.)

The above paragraph is a common lie that violence-minded people tell themselves: Weapons sales "contribute to American prosperity". In actuality, the foreign weapons sales contribute to the total amount of violence in the world. Sometimes the weapons sold are used for conflicts in which the U.S. becomes directly involved. U.S. weapons makers, for example, were completing contracts to deliver weapons to Saddam Hussein while there was a U.S. military build-up to fight Saddam Hussein in what is called the "Gulf War". All time and resources spent building weapons are time and resources taken away from improving the quality of our lives.

The fact that the U.S. government aggressively promotes weapons sales is not a secret from people in the rest of the world, of course. Pentagon plays Afghan card to sell U.S. warplanes [yahoo.com] was carried by Yahoo! India News. The Times of India carried the story: Pentagon plays Afghan card to sell US warplanes [timesofindia.com]. DAWN, "Pakistan's most widely circulated English language newspaper" also ran the story on January 6, 2002: Pentagon plays Afghan card to sell warplanes [dawn.com]. The article quotes General Tome:

"The first question any nation should be asking is how do we link up as tightly as we can with American air power", Walters added in remarks released by his Defence Security Cooperation Agency.

Note that the general does not say that the first question any nation should be asking itself is how to feed its people, or how to manage its resources well. According to his manner of thinking, violence is a way of life, and the U.S. taxpayer should be happy to pay to promote it.

People in countries outside the U.S. read articles like the one in DAWN, and form their opinions about the U.S. government partly from them. Some of those people are terrorists, who also believe that violence is a legitimate and sensible way of relating to other people and solving problems.

Anyone in the world who can pay to use a computer in an internet cafe can easily see, on official web sites, that the U.S. government firmly and publicly believes in promoting violence. Promoting violence is official policy. It is not surprising that others with fewer resources than the U.S. government adopt the same way of looking at the world. It is this kind of thinking that brought the violence of the World Trade Center bombing to the United States.

Note that promotion of U.S. weapons by the U.S. government is effectively just a transfer of taxpayer money to the weapons manufacturers. If the U.S. government did not maintain a weapons sales department, the weapons makers would have to pay the entire cost of weapons sales themselves.

Note also that there seems to be no security issue in promotion of U.S. weapons by the U.S. government. If they didn't buy U.S. weapons, countries wanting to relate to their neighbor counties by killing people and destroying property would presumably find some other way to do so.

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