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50 Facts That Should Change The USA

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As I read through the book, 50 Facts That Should Change The USA, I kept reflecting back on the words in its title. I think it is the word "should" that puzzles me. While I realize many of the researched facts could change our nation, I don't know that all of them should.

Fact 11: For example, Americans spend more than any other industrialized country on civil litigation. That fact makes me wonder why. Is it simply that Americans have more dollars to spend? Maybe it's because the American psyche tends to award high premiums for lawsuits. Could it be that in the United States, juries side more with the plaintiff, or perhaps are easily persuaded?

Idealistically, maybe there is a greater sense of fairness in our country than in the rest of the world? Come now, this last comment seems to stretch the truth, considering the number of daily media reports of injustice occurring in government and industry.

Should this fact change America? I doubt it should or could. There will always be a myriad of lawyers, judges, and plaintiffs until the American economy turns so sour that people cannot afford a trip through the court system.

Fact 13: The fact that 18,000 adults die each year because they don't have health insurance is deplorable and should change America. But alarms go off when Congress is beleaguered by insurance companies and their lobbyists, warning that in our free nation, there is no room for socialized medicine. Could it be that the word socialized remains scented by the word communism?

But what about Fact 40: "65% of American adults are overweight, and 30% are obese, and these proportions are growing." Should all Americans be paying for the healthcare of these people? But then, real obesity is probably more of a mental illness than an inability to curb overeating.

We all recall the 1993 defeat of Hilary Clinton's attempt to stir Congress to act on a healthcare plan for all. Now that Mrs. Clinton is Secretary of State working with President Obama, maybe both can sneak behind the scenes to lobby for a reformed health system for every American, regardless how poor--but then, are Americans supposed to be poor?

Fact 38: Answers a resounding "Yes!" "More than 37 million Americans or one in eight of the population, live below the official poverty guidelines."

Facts 21 and 22: The United States emits 25% of all carbon dioxide emissions which are heating up planet earth to the point of self-destruction. At the same time, our population is increasing twice as fast as that of Europe. These two facts alone tell the USA what it should do to limit the growth of both. Perhaps Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, which has been viewed around the world, will embarrass American technology and industry into curbing emission pollutants.

Obviously, Fact 23: "One baby boomer dies every 52.5 seconds," is probably an insensitive statistic to mention here. And then there's Fact 30: "For 38 years San Francisco had a freeway that ended in mid air." Simply removing the signs warning motorists of impending doom could have reduced our population...!

Fact 18 and referring back to the previous paragraph: Since 44% of Americans believed in year 2000 that Christ would come again during their lifetime, let's hope he comes soon enough to convince Americans that teaching their children about sex and birth control is not sinful. What is truly evil is bringing unwanted children into the world who are unloved. Maybe Jesus' teaching about love would help population control which would then lower carbon dioxide emissions.

Fact 25: America has some of the best universities in the world yet some of the worst high schools. This reviewer has been an educator for more than 30 years with the Pittsburgh Public School system. He feels that fact 25 should change the way Americans think about education. Children with severe behavior problems usurp much of a teacher's time in a regular classroom. This is not the case in college or universities where students pay their way and can be forced to leave a lecture hall if they even hint of becoming unruly.

Not so in public elementary, middle, and high schools, where one will find some of the nation's best, most knowledgeable teachers. While many of these folks could easily teach at a college or university level, the reverse is truly questionable.

Yet lack of student performance is rarely attributed to classroom time wasted with disruptive children. So often, especially in urban schools, students enter from broken homes with a garden-variety of overwhelming psychological and social problems which cannot be solved by their teacher. Disciplining these students steals invaluable on-task time from the average child who should be learning. However, one wonders the consequences to society if these students were dumped from school to roam the streets.

Fact 37: The teaching of intelligent design in American public school has been deigned unconstitutional. It is good that no particular religion is taught in our schools considering the horrors initiated by conflicting religious beliefs down through the ages. One need only look at the state of the world today to see that those same murderous conflicts are alive and healthy.

But on a more educational level, one wonders how terribly wrong it would be to engage children's minds about the "big paradoxes" everyone faces at one time or another: How did the alleged Big Bang occur from apparent nothingness? Will the ultimate particle/energy wave ever be found? Is evolution following some systematic procedure? Is our brain the same as our mind? Granted this may cause a general discussion about various religious doctrines, but would differences not be better addressed in the classroom instead of some nuclear battleground?

In this review of 50 Facts That Should Change the USA, I've attempted to give readers a flavor for only a few of the 50 researched facts found in this book. Although the intention of author Stephen Fender is not to suggest what should be done about any of the facts, nevertheless, the book will gnaw your conscience at times. More often, as a repository of odd truths, it will make you chuckle.

I'd recommend the book to any person seeking a novel slant about the United States and its inhabitants. Its 50 Facts That Should Change The USA, will provide anyone who loves data with plenty of good conversation starters.

Finally, as a retired educator, I'd recommend the book be read as part of a high school program to improve students' critical thinking skills. As I have done above, it would be fun to let students correlate some of the 50 data pieces. I feel certain that lively classroom discussion would result.

Review written by Regis Schilken
Author of:
Tears of Deceit

Other interesting books:
Did Lincoln Own Slaves?: And Other Frequently Asked Questions about Abraham Lincoln (Vintage Civil War Library)
Just The Facts: 50 Great Years of American Military History

Some facts aren't obvious and are downright shocking when one learns of them. "50 Facts That Should Change the USA" is a collection of these facts. Each fact has an explanation backing it up. The facts range from bizarre, such as nearly three million Americans claiming alien abductions, to the sad state of America's public education when compared to private education. "50 Facts That Should Change the USA" is educational and eye opening, and is a solid pick for the reader who wants to know the true state of America.

I guess 50 Facts That Should Change the USA is an attempt to show "the shocking truth" about a lot of negative things about the USA that should be changed. However, to anybody over the age of 20 or 25 that occasionally reads the newspaper or listens to the news, none of these facts are particularly shocking, they are mostly just sad reminders that we live in a country where the reality is not as nice as the dream. A large part of the facts that are sad (income disparity, lack of health insurance, bad education) is because Americans in general, are not willing to pay for those things that benefit all of society. We are a dog-eat-dog capitalist country to a fault. As long as you've got lots of money, few of these facts are going to affect your life.

The book is sometimes a bizarre collection of facts and random thoughts about those facts. It appears that the intended audience is for British readers, and not for American readers. Many of the essays after the stated affect seem strangely disconnected from the country I live in - as if the writer doesn't actually know much about America (the back of the book notes that the author, although American, currently lives in England).

At least two of the statements in the book that I have personal knowledge of are just plain wrong. The so-called fact that the USA emits more carbon dioxide than China, India, and Japan combined is simply wrong. China is the largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, not the USA. The references section states that the author got his information from a newspaper in 2005 - and I can assure you that newspapers are terrible sources of information for anything scientific.

The other statement is in support of the "obese American" fact. He states that the documentary film-maker Morgan Spurlock, who made "Supersize Me", gained 25 pounds and developed a serious liver disorder from living on nothing but McDonalds fast-food for one month, (all while running three miles a day). The last part in parentheses about running three miles a day is simply false - I've seen the movie twice and Morgan specifically tells us that he stopped all exercise, even walking to work in Manhattan, while going through the 30-day McDonalds eating test, because he wanted to copy the average American as closely as possible, which means no exercise. From this false statement, it appears likely that the author never even saw the movie he cited. If he did watch it, he certainly wasn't paying attention. I wonder what other facts he got wrong?

This 50 Facts book is mostly just some strange facts jumbled together, and although it might give some insight about the American way of life to a foreigner, if you actually live here, you won't find much new or surprising in this book.

For a better read on bizarre and interesting facts about the American persona, public policy, and economy, I would recommend that instead of this book, you read "Freakonomics" and "Super Freakonomics" for a much more interesting read on similar subjects.