I've been in the US for 7 years now, all in the Chicago suburbs. Taught in some Chicago charter schools (never again!) which were like war zones. Was a weekly occurrence to have emails from the principal's office about student(s) that would be absent as they'd been shot, had family members killed or were getting banged-up.
Where I live is pretty decent, no nightly shootings or drive-bys and the neighbours are great, but I wouldn't like to live (or even go back to work) in the City.
The news is very agenda driven, which is why I try to watch several different versions (when I can be bothered (also some decent eye-candy)). Most of my new I get via the interweb from site I believe I can at least trust to deliver some truth.
It's very different to growing up in Caithness, chiels, that I can tell you, but I am happy here with my family (happy enough that I'm seriously considering citizenship). The country is, however, pretty fucked-up in a lot of ways. Personal opinion is that it's no longer "one nation" but a conglomerate of different ethnic and regional "countries" that would all like to be independent of each other but are too financially dependent on sucking the teet of federal funding to actually do anything about it.
Anyway I better do some work and keep living the American dream