The United States of America Scares the Hell out of Me

It is nothing like the country I thought it would be

A 2-year-old boy finds a gadget lying unattended. It looks like a toy. He loves toys. He plays with it. He fiddles with it. Ah — that’s how he works — he muses. He sticks his small fingers into the slot where it seems to be inviting him to stick them in.

He pulls the trigger.

There is a bang.

He has just shot and killed his father.

News of a toddler shooting his own father with a Glock-19 and killing him popped up on my feed less than two weeks after yet another brutal school shooting incident in Texas, which killed 19 students.

These kids didn’t have to die.

The father didn’t have to die.

And yet, they did.

The land of the free and the home of the brave?

Growing up in the 1990s in Singapore, I used to think that the United States of America was the land of the free and the home of the brave. I was a young, naive, and foolish child.

Barely 10 years old, I only had a faint awareness of the mystical country of America. In my naive understanding of the world, America was a great country. America had MacDonalds, Levi’s jeans, and Michael Jackson.

And we — living in Singapore — we loved it. We loved American popular culture.

We lapped it all up.

All of this was before the 9/11 incident. This was before the rise of China. And Japan was still the world’s number two economy. But America was the most powerful country in the world, economically, politically, and culturally.

I was going to have to wait another 23 years before I finally visited the country, and even then, it was only going to be New York City — certainly nothing representative of the rest of the country.

Today, it feels like America is a different place — corrupted and poisoned by its love of guns. I have American friends. One of my closest friends is American. And even he can’t figure out the gun madness that America finds itself in.

But perhaps I just didn’t know America well enough to know that something was already not right in the 1990s.

How deep does the rot go?

In 1994, an American, Michael P. Fay, was sentenced to six strokes of the cane in Singapore for vandalizing a vehicle.

He was only 18 years old. The news was covered by local media and put Singapore on the world map, for better or worse.

Singapore’s caning of accused vandal Michael Fay on May 5 forced the city-state, which bans everything from Cosmopolitan magazine to satellite dishes, to confront the most unmanageable of monsters: the Western press. — American Journalism Review (archive.org)

Remarkably, the Clinton administration intervened in the case. On account of US-Singapore relations, the sentence was ultimately reduced from 6 strokes to 4 strokes.

Why am I bringing this incident up?

This case was a big deal in the 1990s. Time Magazine interviewed the late and then Senior Minister of Singapore — Mr. Lee Kuan Yew — on the punishment. The late Lee not only reaffirmed Singapore’s position as the moral one. He also argued that American society had gone fundamentally wrong.

I don’t want to go into polemics, but any society in which two innocent Japanese students in Los Angeles can be shot dead because someone wanted their car has gone fundamentally wrong. Too many guns, and such a distortion of values that two human lives can be disposed of for chattel.

— A Rigorous Case for Morality: Lee Kuan Yew — TIME, my emphasis in bold

Mr. Lee Kuan Yew was referring to the shooting of Takuma Ito and Go Matsuura in 1994. They were only 19 when they were shot. And that was only 2 years after the infamous shooting of another Japanese student, Yoshihiro Hattori. This other student was killed in 1992 when he stumbled onto the wrong house while searching for a Halloween party.

Now, living in Japan where — I quote Yuko Tamura — a country free from gun violence, and where “children travel to school by themselves,” I cannot help but think that America is nothing more than the land of fear and the home of those brave enough to continue living there.

The numbers don’t lie. The US is an outlier amongst developed countries. It has 3.94 gun-related deaths for every 100,000 people. Compare that to Japan’s 0.021. Not perfect, but 188 times safer than the United States.

Not convinced? Here’s another one: Data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) shows that when we look at developed economies, no other country in the world has the same statistics of violent firearm deaths as this country.

I’m not brave enough to live in a country as violent as the United States.

Deadly weapons or fun toys?

In Singapore, all able-bodied men have to serve in the military. I served in the military for over two years. Most men have experience with firearms, and we know that sh*t is deadly.

Anyone who has gone through basic military training knows this. Hell, we have drills and lessons and tests. We learn how to strip our weapons, maintain them, and account for every single round during live range practices.

In the end, we must swear that we have not taken any kind of live round, dead round, ammunition, or any other kind of pyrotechnics out of the range. Then we return our rifles to the armory. We sign in. The rifles are locked. The gate is heavily padlocked.

That’s how we treat our firearms in the military. We treat them like the deadly weapons they rightfully are.

In the United States, people treat them like toys. Two-year-old toddlers readily fiddle with them. School kids can get access to them. A random person can walk into a school and start shooting like it were a computer game.

Don’t they get it? — And I know how the argument will go.

“It’s our right to defend ourselves.”

“Shut up, you foreigner, you don’t know anything about America.”

You’re right, I don’t.

If you need to exercise the right to defend yourselves — fine, you can arm yourselves. And, if it’s so dangerous that you have no other choice than to own a firearm — well, that just proves my point. America is dangerous.

America is a country where people don’t trust each other. They don’t trust the government. They don’t trust authorities. In the American psyche, the world is still the Wild West.

Protect yourself or be killed. For me, that is a sad, sad kind of existence, but what do I know?

Born in Asia, I will never comprehend America’s love of guns.

All gone to look for America

It is not the intention of this essay to offend anyone — American or not. But I fear that it might do so all the same.

As I sit here, hammering on my computer these words that attempt to connect with an individual sitting on the other side of this celestial body we live on, I wonder if any American will agree that there is a sickness in America?

Or would I receive a bunch of hate mail or lose followers? Worse still — would I be banned from the platform for speaking freely?

That would be the ultimate irony.

As I close this essay, I think of the Crowned Lady standing at the mouth of the Hudson River which I had caught a glimpse of when I visited New York City.

I remember the moment when I took in the list of names etched onto the memorial of the World Trade Center. I think about all the lives that have been lost in the name of freedom, for this country that will irrevocably remain a foreign and mysterious land to me.

I had walked off to look for America.

The greatest country in the world. The fabled land of the free and the home of the brave. I thought I had arrived in America.

Yet America was nowhere to be found.

The author is an editor of Japonica, a Japan-focused publication, but writes on a wide variety of topics. His key topics are society, culture, modern work, creator economy, and cryptocurrency, with the occasional fictional story, creative piece, or reflective essay. Discover his most-read stories here.