While I didn’t formally interview three people of different ages, I have had an innumerable number of conversations about US culture and politics, especially as compared with Germany. My Guesthouse owner, a woman 60 years of age, expressed extreme discontent about the US pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement. She is generally fond of Americans and the United States, but this political news opened up a new can of worms of her views on the US’s actions to combat climate change. She complained about our lack of perspective as a nation with a threefold punch of unprecedented power, influence, and geographic isolation. She made the case that the US is far behind Europe in creating a society less based around consumption and more around minimalism. I think my main response to this is that the US, throughout it’s history, has been arguably the purest capitalist state ever produced. I would cut us a little bit of slack in the transition from rampant consumerism, a stereotype for which we are widely known, to a more frugal society. Nonetheless, I think we can learn a lot from the green way Germans live – for they are a much older nation with a distinctly different history than us. Another conversation about this topic that struck a tone with me was with some Russian kids I became friends with. They held more progressive views about the current state of the Russian federation and had really nothing negative to say about the United States, surprisingly. They all mentioned that Russia, and by extension Putin, runs under the false mask of democracy. They said that dissenters of Putin are silenced, and media is highly censored behind the scenes. This lead to a discussion about the volatility and intensity of the US media. My friends said they are amazed at what our media is allowed to and does say, on both sides of the aisle. They said they love consuming American news media because it is, in their view, a pure crusade to make every perspective available. Yes, sometimes, to disavow and tear down others, but they were awestruck about savagery with which our media functions. A hot topic was Colbert’s daily lambasting of Trump. The dichotomy between our countries’ respective media approaches definitely sparked interest from both sides – mine and theirs.