Global visitors traveling for the World Cup may well be the best ‘brand ambassadors’ for the U.S., but it’s Americans who needed that third-party validation
A news story is an event that defies expectations. We all expect a dog to bite a man, so that’s not news. However, when a man bites a dog, that’s a rare occurrence and the makings of a solid news story.
The problem with this model is that when the only things that make the news are the oddities, the anomalies, the dots that get plotted outside a normal distribution. Over time, the constant drumbeat on everything that’s weird starts to make the glitches feel normal.
That’s been the case for news coverage both in this country, and about this country for a long time. It’s overwhelmingly negative. We don’t ‘ask what we can do for our country anymore,’ we flood to social media to demand what we think our country owes us.
Trust is at an all-time low. Political polarization is high. Everyone, it seems, has an issue, a trigger, and a reason to be offended. Indeed the U.S. isn’t perfect, but we have a lot for which to be grateful. And it just took millions of international visitors vacationing our country to remind of that fact.
America lost the game but gained the world
Thankfully, The Wall Street Journal, the daily meditation for capitalism, picked up that story: How the U.S. Lost the World Cup—and Won Over the World.
Some of the lines in that story that stood out to me are the following:
- “…fans flocked to the U.S. by the millions anyway—and what they found was an America that looked nothing like the one they’d seen on social media back home.”
- “At a time when the Atlantic has never felt wider and U.S. foreign policy has sometimes put the country at odds with even its oldest allies, the World Cup was a pointed reminder that America still possesses a shine dazzling enough to entrance the rest of the world.”
- “…the experience of visiting fans was different from the xenophobic country they had been led to believe they were coming to.”
- “And as it turns out, it wasn’t the state-of-the-art stadiums or 250th anniversary fireworks—or anything else the U.S. proudly set out to project to the rest of the world—that captivated visitors. The best advertisement for America was simply America itself.”
For the last couple of weeks, my social media streams have been flooded with international visitors uncovering delights we take for granted. It’s been refreshing to see and their enthusiasm is telling: if they had this stuff in their country, they wouldn’t be so excited to see it here.
The abundance, variety, security and the freedom we have in this country is unmatched anywhere in the world. As a society, or at least the one that’s reflected in our news media, we seem to have forgotten just how lucky we are to live here.
“International travelers,” the Journal said, “are America’s “best brand ambassadors.” Perhaps that’s true, but at this moment in time, it seems to me that many Americans that need to hear this third-party validation.
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