I'm back inside the United States. I have observations, made on-the-fly.
Random.
They don't necessarily follow a sequence, add up, or fall into a hierarchy. Nevertheless, some things have struck me about this always odd land.
In a supermarket checkout line, I noticed that the people ahead of me, evidently a mother and nearly-adult daughter, had a lot of packaged foods. Among them five or six tubes of potato chips. Tubes. Chips packaged in plastic tubes that may outlast the pyramids.
I used the restroom at Millersylvania State Park one morning. The gent walking out ahead of me went from the restroom to the parking lot, got into his large SUV, and drove 200 feet back to his home-away-from-home, where he exited the truck and went back inside.
About half the land area here seems to be parking lots. There are no free-range people at large on the streets. Everyone is in motorized wheelchairs (Ford, Toyota, Mazda, Jeep, Kia, whatever).
The streets are desolate. (See previous item.) We are all isolates in our steel cans, drifting separately. Most afoot these days are homeless.
No one has children. In supermarkets, you see a few infants sitting in the grocery carts pushed around by Mom, and occasionally see one carried in a harness (usually on Mom's front side), but you don't see children walking with their parents. The three to 10 cohort is missing. There are no family groups walking around together anywhere, holding hands.
People are afraid of contact. Two years ago, out of practice from being away, I crashed my grocery cart into someone else's. The guy apologized, to me. It seems that one of the worst things a person can do is to get close to anyone else. Within two feet you hit the warning zone. People stop, jerk upright, look around, brace themselves for evasive action.
Within two feet things go critical. People begin actually taking evasive action, say "Sorry!", "Excuse me!", "Whoops!" in hopes that they won't under any circumstances actually make physical contact. Closer than that and anything can happen. If you actually touch someone they may erupt in anger and get in your face (without getting any closer), or erupt in an abject apology and slink away. Or do something completely unpredictable.
But on the road it's all close calls. While I'm driving safely and not holding up tens of vehicles behind, or any, I have people floor it and roar around me so they can slam on their brakes and screech to a stop at the impending stop sign just ahead — but ahead of me. That's the important thing. It's those two or three critical seconds that Americans will not let get away. Or will die trying to hold fast to.
Speed seems to be the most important thing in life.
Back to the supermarket: You get an apology from the cashier if the transaction of the person ahead of you takes more than 30 seconds. As if that mattered. On the road: The speed limit is seen as a minimum, especially so if the road is familiar and the person roaring out to pass from behind you has been over this stretch a couple of hundred times without crashing or murdering anyone's children, so hey, if the speed limit is 30 then it should always be safe at 50.
Aggressive, uncompromising moralism applied to random events: As I stood in the supermarket aisle reading the label on a can of beanless chili, a guy passing behind me yelled out "There's a lot of salt in that!" There wasn't, but he couldn't help it. He had to warn-criticize me in public for being so perverse as to buy chili in a can, possibly containing some of this week's evil edible. And why was it his business? Because he was moral and I wasn't. So there, guy, watch your salt.
The stores are full of the crippled. Especially food stores. They travel in motorized carts. Those able to walk do so but hobble. These are people who have never walked farther than from the cab of their giant SUV to the restroom door and back. They are stiff. Their spines no longer flex. Their knees hardly bend. They rock from side to side as they walk, and quit as soon as they can.
Obese. There are huge numbers of obese people here, growing all the time. They take up so much otherwise beautiful space. When I was young a fat person was a rare sight, something to wonder about. Now they are an ever-present shuffling obstacle course.
Packages. Nearly all the food is in packages, each fulsomely decorated with clever graphics. The raw meat, fruit, and vegetable sections continue to decline. They are not trendy, and at best represent yet more work to do once you get home. Instead of ripping open a convenient package and just stuffing the contents into your head, which is what God intended, after all, isn't it?