40 Things Only Americans Think Are Normal

The redditor who posted the thread in the first place told us that they usually don’t hang out in the crowded default subreddits. “Either the thread gets too big for a conversation or it goes unnoticed in a sea of similar topics. In hindsight, it's not strange it got so much attention, Reddit is very diverse but a US-centric view is still dominant, and everyone wants to weigh in. Lots of people just wanted to vent, some had a strong political opinion, and some just wanted to ridicule the US.”

According to the Reddit user, they made the thread “on a whim” after they saw a comment by a redditor who was surprised to learn that not everyone has police officers at school.

“I did hope that starting this topic would end up in a couple of people sharing that kind of information among each other, because the US is going through some [crap], and it helps your morale to know that alternatives do exist.”

They continued: “Some people took it as a competition of which country is better, but it was intended without any kind of nationalist feelings, more with an idea of people defining things among themselves vs. how things are shown to be in schools and TV shows, in and outside the US.”

One thing that the redditor did expect to see in the thread but was surprised to hear so many voices speaking against it was the “circumcision of infant males for non-medical, non-religious reasons but rather as a default procedure.” The redditor added: “Parents who decide against circumcising their newborn child but don't know how it works and what to teach their kid: there's a WikiHow!”

The thread shone a light on a lot of problems in the United States and suggested that these things need to change. “The things that got repeated most in the thread were division of ethnic groups, gun culture, military drafting and continuous warfare, cop culture, nutrition issues, corporate lobbying... and wearing shoes in the house,” the OP explained.

“It's not as if all those comments came from non-US redditors, a lot of the criticism was from US citizens with genuine concern and investment in their future and their surroundings. Combine that with getting active and finding each other, just as widespread protests are helping to create a framework of solidarity, I think change is already happening if you just keep at it,” they said.

“I saw a lot of people from outside the US who feel racism or racist police brutality are a typical US thing. It sure looks like there's a structural issue, but please don't use the US as a way to shift blame because ‘they're worse,’ to get out of examining the same structural issues in your own locality,” the redditor added.

While the US thinks a lot of weird things are normal, the one that isn’t giving us any peace and quiet is that Americans write the date as mm/dd/yyyy. So, why exactly do Americans write the date by putting the month before the day?

Of course, it seems completely logical to somebody who’s grown up with this system and uses it every single day of their lives. Nothing could be more natural, in their opinion. But from an outsider’s perspective, it looks downright weird and illogical. And the US is the only country in the world that does things this way.

There are several theories about this. One of them is that in certain cases, it’s more convenient to know the month first rather than the day. For instance, when somebody asks you when your birthday is, it’s more useful to know the month first to get your bearings right before zoning in on the exact day.

Another theory is that American colonists inherited the monthly date format from the British Empire. In time, the British moved over to the European style where you put the day first, then the month, then the year. While Americans stuck with the old-school format.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the International Organization for Standardization claims that putting the year first, then the month, then the day is the internationally accepted way to represent the date. To make things even more confusing, the US military uses the dd/mm/yyyy format for correspondence but it switches to the mm/dd/yyyy format when corresponding with civilians. Does that sound like a lot of info to take in? You bet! And that’s just one of the weird things that Americans think are normal.