Some Things I've Noticed

My camera has been found! Unfortunately it hasn't been returned to me yet, but when it is, I'll be sure to let you know and edit the Jylland post to include pictures!

This week has been a pretty standard one. I'm starting to settle into a routine, which is nice. I've also been here for nearly a month now, and I've made some interesting observations about what is different and what is the same here. A lot of the differences are small things, but they're just different enough to notice: baby carriages, for example, or the toilets. Nearly every baby carriage I've seen looks roughly like this. Some of them are double-wide, to carry twins. There are also A LOT of babies here (Denmark has one of the highest fertility rates in Europe), and people generally just leave the carriages outside of stores while they're inside shopping, sometimes with the baby in it, which is really startling to see! Our Danish teacher says people usually lock them or have an alarm system, but she also says it's just a sign of the tremendous social trust people have here. I just can't imagine anyone leaving a stroller outside in the US, much less one with a baby in it! Although in the US people also seem to stay home with their babies, whereas here the babies are brought along everywhere.

Babies aside, there is a definite difference in the attitude of society here. Everyone, and every social system, seems more focused on the community or family. A full time job is 37 hours a week, and though some people work more than that, it seems pretty rare. Compare that to the US, where most people work at least 50 hours a week, generally more. Another difference is in the costumer-business relationship. Whereas in the US, most of our economic system is really focused on the consumer, here it's focused on the worker. I was speaking with one of the DIS interns the other night and she made the comment that costumer service is very lax here, because companies want their workers to be happy more than they want the costumers to be happy.

Obviously, the "welfare state" also indicates the importance of community. It's based on the idea that "the broadest shoulders carry the heaviest burden." Thus, my host parents, who are pretty well-off, pay 60% of their income towards taxes. Most folks pay around 50%. But minimum wage also is roughly $22, and even though they only get $11 after taxes, that's still around 50% more than most similar workers in the US get. Plus, those taxes provide for a lot of the basic needs of the society, such as health care and education, and I assume some basic housing and food for those who are unable to work or afford it otherwise. My host mom was baffled when I told her how much we pay to go to Mac, and I get a large amount of financial aid, too.

Although the system should provide for everyone, you still do see people begging sometimes (I mean, I've seen like one). My Danish teacher said that some people don't want to get money from the government, and others are mentally ill (which made me wonder how much the health care system covers mental health, though I'd heard they were quite good at that.) Another group that one sees begging, according to my teacher, are illegal immigrants, because it's basically impossible to get a job or assistance from the government (obviously).

The difference between the US and Denmark is really in the national history, though. If you think about it, Denmark and the US have followed kind of opposite trajectories up to this point. Denmark just keeps getting smaller and the US has gotten larger. We also don't have a past that includes Grundtvig, who started the Folk High School movement in the 1800s under the premise that education should be accessible to everyone, including farm workers. Nor do we have a past that includes losing a large part of our area due to humiliating losses which led to a much more peaceful foreign policy until the mid-20th century. The US also industrialized earlier than Denmark (most places did), so there's this image of Denmark being built on the shoulders of farmers, since it was largely rural until quite recently. While the Danish system would never work in the US, given the differences in history, as well as the fact that Denmark is much smaller and much more homogeneous (with an immigration process even more difficult to navigate than that of the US), I can't help but feel we can learn a lot from it. Like, socialized medicine isn't the devil, for example. And that everyone deserves a good education. But our national narrative is so wrapped up in "The American Dream" of pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps that there isn't room for the narrative of community members supporting each other. (Narrative is basically the theme of my semester, I've discovered. I think we talked about it in all of my classes except one this week!)