I’m very sociable in Spanish, so I strike up conversations with everybody. And the time always comes when people ask me, in tragic voices with a hint of gloating, “so how are things in the USA?”
I handle this by giving extensive reports on the weather conditions in my region.
“But Trump, but guns, but crime, but aren’t you scared to live in such a dangerous place?” people rattle off.
“Nah, that’s all hype,” I say, “but we did already have a couple of tornado warnings this summer.”
One can only be concerned about what they normally encounter in their own immediate environment. If you lived in an inner-city area or poor neighborhood then you’d have cause for concern about “guns” and “violence”. But if those elements are not part of your everyday life they just become “something you hear about on the news”, not unlike what those outside the U.S. hear about on their news reports when “events in the U.S.” are covered.
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