As you’re reading this, I will have already left America and will hopefully be arriving in Italy. But as I wrote this, I was doing my last bits of panicked, over-thought packing. So, to pass the time I proposed a question about the country I’m leaving:

What makes America the greatest country in the world?

People who’ve seen “The Newsroom” will know where I’m going with this, and going abroad is the perfect chance to get a new perspective on it. Right now, I don’t believe America is the greatest country, but I’m hoping to be proved wrong — or at least get a better answer.

My own feelings are summed up well in the article “10 Things Most Americans Don’t Know About America” by Mark Manson. He spent three years abroad, and his article compares America to the countries he visited, writing that his view of America has been wrong for a long time.

In short, he says most other countries are indifferent to us. Compared to them, we’re not friendly people, we have greater inequality, we’re more paranoid about losing our safety and freedom, we’re more self-absorbed, we live an unhealthy and pricey lifestyle, and we mistake comfort for happiness.

While I disagree with many points, reading that all Bangkok taxis have disco lights and free Wi-Fi, I found myself in painful agreement way too much.

After all, anyone who googles a few global rankings will know America isn’t number one on many lists. We’re below in math, health care, education, income mobility and more. Two areas we do rank highest in are GDP — which is basically how big our economy is — and defense spending.

But we also rank highest in money owed to other countries, and we spend more in defense than 10 countries combined, making it more bloated than strong.

So, overall, can we really say we’re No. 1?

One other area to look at is culture. The author traces our apparent culture of paranoia and narcissism mostly to our pride in being American, comparing us to a delusional drunk cousin. A step too far for me, but I still wondered, are our egos really that big?

Just looking at the comments on the article, some certainly are. About half of them were either resigned in sad despair of how much we’ve fallen. The other half were attacking the article so furiously, it was like it jabbed their hearts with iron spikes. Whether they accepted or denied the article, it left a deep bruise.

It’s another reason I’m eager to go to Europe: to see for myself how much is really true. America still has its strong points, but are we unaware of how many weak ones we have? Is much of our American pride actually empty vanity? Being able to compare America with a couple of European countries through my own eyes will hopefully give me an answer.

I still hope I’m wrong, and that America still deserves its pride. After all, these proud feelings drive so much of American life: people fighting for and living out the American dream.

When you take that away, it would be like the country’s tires blowing out. Would we just screech to a halt, not knowing how to keep going, paralyzed by our own culture shock?

So, let me ask you the same question again, and think about it with pure honesty: What makes America the greatest country in the world?

Max Antonucci is a junior newspaper and online journalism major whose column appears every Tuesday in Pulp. Visit his website at www.MaxwellAntonucci.com, find him on Twitter at @DigitalMaxToday, or email him at meantonu@syr.edu.

Published on September 2, 2013 at 10:24 pm