Follow-up: Reconsider your opinions regarding your nationality

This exercise was originally posted at: http://maritimeorca0.blogspot.com/2013/02/reconsider-your-opinions-regarding-your.html

The Task

Reconsider your opinions regarding your nationality. Try to determine whether or not your country is what you think it is. If not, what is it?

My Idea

My country, the United States, claims to be the land of the free. The problem with this is that we lack freedom. We are sent to school at a young age where the country can indoctrinate us with the values that they want. This results in a significant degree of conformity. The job market has adapted to the schools, so we need to succumb to the schools if we want to succeed in life. With the importance of money in the modern world, this can threaten the survival of those who do not conform. This takes away from the rights of the individual. Since our country is taking away our right to individuality, we are effectively mental slaves to our government.
Does this mean that I feel that the United States is among the worst countries? I have no idea. I haven’t spent significant time travelling the globe, so I really don’t have a proper comparison. For all I know, the United States really could be as free as it gets. Even so, the country is well below what I think we deserve in that regard.
 

Notes

If anyone has visited my other blog, my answers will be nothing new (although they have been simplified). I find the problems that I keep discussing to be highly visible, and I can’t overlook them. This could be viewed as a flaw on my part since I couldn’t properly detach from what I have already discovered.
 

Feel Free to Comment

Now that this exercise has concluded, feel free to share any thoughts that you had regarding results, your approach, and any other ideas that popped into your head regarding this exercise.

Upon completion of this exercise, please fill out the following form:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEw2MXJPSl9tWFNnTVFqcXozR1duZlE6MA
Responses to the above form are collected and stored in a spreadsheet that can be viewed at:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Agcdh--NHOS0dEw2MXJPSl9tWFNnTVFqcXozR1duZlE&output=html