The worst part of this "America is garbage" joke is that a lot of other countries actually think it's true.

There was a post about police violence calling America a third world country or something, and there were people from other countries saying they were scared of going to America because they thought they'd get killed. Realistically, they couldn't be further from the truth. America is incredibly peaceful and, in a lot of places, rather polite. The same people very well could live in countries, or vacation in countries, with higher crime rates.

For some reason, American media and a lot of popular American culture really likes to talk smack about itself.

I guess that's a first world problem... that because the U.S. is actually doing pretty good relative to other countries and former civilizations they diss on themselves because the grass is always greener somewhere else.

Of course there's room for improvement, a lot of room to improve, but its nowhere close to as bad as the world used to be.