Political Comments in Denmark #1of2

In both 1979 and in 1985, on the main walking street in Copenhagen, there were people collecting money to feed the “poor children in America.” They advertised, and invited people to see a film that showed hungry children in gutters, people being shot, and all other kinds of problems in the US. Wonder what they really did with the money they collected.

We had a large “coffee table” book about the US that we had purchased in Vienna as a gift for Cousin Hugo. In the Copenhagen campsite, the young people just could not imagine it was real. They said they had never been told that the US looked anything like that. The fact that the book was printed in the German language, in Vienna, gave it some validity in their mind.

During our conversation, one of them said that the opening scene in the TV program “Dallas” was made in a US Government propaganda lab, as “… no city anywhere in the world looked like that.” Since we had lived in Dallas, and had traveled throughout the USA, we assured them that was not only a real video of Dallas, there were dozens of cities in the US that could have been used for a scene like that.

In 1985 we talked to a Dane who had sent his two daughters to school in the US, one to Ohio and the other to Wisconsin. We asked about their opinion of the US. His daughters told him that US families do not eat three meals a day together, and families do not spend enough time as a family group. We never heard, or at least don’t remember, why he sent his daughters to the USA in the first place. His daughters were spending no time with him, they were 6,000 miles away.

They also said school teachers in the US are not as interested in their students as the Danish teachers are; there is little discipline in the schools; black and white students do not associate with each other. While he wasn’t really negative about the US, he did not seem too pleased with it either.

We reminded him that the front page of his newspaper that very day had a picture and story about 200 Iranians living in Denmark, and that the Danes were very upset with them. He then admitted the Danes complain that in the US, we don’t treat our millions of immigrants the way the Danes say we should. He then said, "But this is Denmark, and we don't want any immigrants." He admitted the Danes don’t treat their very few immigrants, very well at all.