And if I tell people I would like to live in the US, they look at me as if I were suicidal!
Do these conversations go on long enough for you to learn why?
I once had a student who had moved here from Sweden. He said he liked living in a country where he got to keep a decent fraction of what he earned rather than having it taken form him and given to someone else, and his friends back home just couldn't understand that.
I wonder what it is about the States that most terrifies or appalls the average European of the sort you mention.
What -- and leave me behind?!
Knighthawk, you skunk ;>)
I am also seriously thinking of leaving -- either to the States or to Israel. It's not going to be easy for me, because the kind of work I do is difficult to find outside of Germany. I will have to start from nothing.
I spent several hours today reading the message board of Der Spiegel, Germany's "most respected" newsmagazine.
The level of sneering contempt for Israel, the U.S., Americans and Jews is something I have never seen before. These are not stereotypical brownshirt troglodytes but highly articulate, educated people. The "moderate" ones are clones of Robert Fisk, and the more extreme channel Yassir Arafat.
It is perhaps significant that in your country, the Netherlands, the leader of the new party that took a stand against the Islamic invasion was an outspoken supporter of Israel. Not so in Austria (Haider, who cannot hold a speech without an anti-Jewish crack) and the UK (the National Front: skinhead Jew-haters). Germany's current foreign minister Fischer, a Green, is pro-Israel but the next government will have a foreign minister from the FDP.
In Germany's most populous state (North Rhine-Westphalia) the FDP has just taken on a Jamal Karsli, a Syrian-German politician, as a member of its delegation in the state parliament, who wasted no time denouncing "Israeli Nazi methods", "Jewish control of the media", the "Zionist worldwide lobby", all the old chestnuts.
The federation of German Jews has called for the FDP to cut all ties with Mr. Karsli, and this demand triggered a sh!tstorm of rage from a huge number of Germans.
On a psychological level I can even understand this massive resentment against Jews. Every German is taught in school about the Holocaust; newspapers and broadcast media periodically remind everyone of what the Nazis did, and this goes counter to a normal human desire, i.e. to feel proud of your people and country. Feelings of shame turn to resentment and now this resentment is erupting in a huge anti-Jewish groundswell.
I can understand but it also makes me sick.