Is the U.S. an exceptional country?

Sharon Ettinger

            “Do you guys really go to school in big yellow busses?”

            In broken English, my sister’s friend Sara asked us an apparently commonly pondered question from her home in Barcelona. She brushed a strand of hair from her cheek as the brisk New England winter air whistled past, and the distant rumbling of a bus momentarily grasped her attention that was so intensely focused on the other side of her thick camera lens. She could not be any more ostentatious—wandering the casual streets of Lexington center, her colorful pants flowed in the wind as she captured photographs of the simplest details with her huge black camera, catching every passerby’s curious eye. Sara took no notice to this attention, as she was rapt in the wonders of the stores and benches and sidewalks. Her amazement of such simplicity in our culture was remarkable.

Before her visit here, Sara had studied in several other countries beforehand including Spain, Denmark, and Ireland, but something she never ceased to glorify during her visit here was the outstanding education. Upon asking her about her past experiences studying abroad, she let out a shy laugh and stated simply, “It is all better here.” Watching her sit at our kitchen table with her nose inches from her work, I came to realize that students from all over the world are constantly grasping opportunities to study in America.

“Would you like to stay for dinner?”

Sara freed herself from her tangle of work to meet my mom’s gaze. A simple question, yet Sara’s eyes were bright as she graciously accepted. I couldn’t help but to notice throughout our routinely family dinner the state of awe she was in. Pass the salad? She jumped to pass it; a smile laced with nervousness and suppressed joy tempting her lips.

As I later learned, this evident exhilaration was a result of her finally living the long aspired “American dream”. She had finally started living it, triggered by that simple family dinner that contrasted so drastically with her uneasy relationship with each member of her family, who she no longer lived with. The family, the jobs, the schools, and the smiles—all came together to be the American dream of which Sara would whisper her envy to my sister before her stay here.

A few months passed after Sara’s stay, after which she moved into an apartment in New York, but our hosting wasn’t over—this time it was Jen, a family friend from England whose plan to visit was a pleasant surprise. But the excitement of her visit was lined with negative connotations: a long suffering patient of lime disease, she had to quickly make arrangements to come to the United States when her doctors turned to American medics after struggling with her particularly severe case.

The airport was its same restless self as we sat impatiently on a particularly hard bench just outside of Jen’s gate. Disheveled passengers with bloodshot eyes and wrinkled clothes began to slowly trickle off the plane. We sat craning our necks over the crowd of groggy passengers until it seemed the very last one had exited, and then emerging slowly through the gate door was Jen, escorted in a wheelchair by a flight attendant. It was such an odd sight—her hands were folded neatly as she rolled towards us in the chair but the precious freshness in her twenty-year-old face screamed that she should be taking advantage of her youth instead of dealing with the toll lime disease had taken on her weak body. Still she smiled, tired as she was, for now that she was finally in America the thought that this might just be where her life goes back to normal officially set in.

She stayed for a few months, and by the end of it every high-class doctor we could think of was mulling over her case that had stumped so many doctors back in England. Her hopes were high—doctors in the United States never fail, right?

This is another example of America’s incredible reputation. Both Sara’s and Jen’s situations are just one out of thousands of examples where people around the world focus on America’s greatness, dreaming to someday travel here to experience the life they’ve been admiring or to improve their lives off of things like education or health care. The United States is an exceptional country, because it has achieved such distinctiveness in its balance among all of the significant aspects of a strong and successful nation that other countries do indeed admire at even the slightest details.