Tomorrow is the Fourth of July and, well, I have not exactly been feeling the spirit. Not because I have stopped loving the country. It is because loving the country has become harder work than it has ever been in my lifetime—a lifetime that includes Vietnam, Watergate, all of that. For a lot of us — maybe half the country, maybe more depending on the day — patriotism now comes with a kind of emotional whiplash. You want to feel gratitude. You want to feel pride. You want to feel the old civic warmth of the holiday. And then you look around at the political condition of the country and wonder how a nation with so much promise, so much talent, so much wealth, so much accumulated democratic inheritance, could let itself become such a miseble hot mess.
So I came into this July 4 weekend bracing myself for the familiar dissonance: fireworks and flags on one side, democratic decay and civic exhaustion on the other.
And then, almost by accident, the World Cup gave me something I did not know I needed.
Not a solution. Not a grand argument. Not a reason to ignore what is broken.
Just a mirror.
Over the last couple of weeks, as soccer fans from around the world have poured into the United States, a small genre of social media has emerged: foreign visitors reacting to ordinary American life. Not the Grand Canyon. (Although there is a great reaction of some Cubans to that.) Not the Statue of Liberty. Not the monuments in Washington. Not even, mostly, the stadiums.
Ordinary America.
Waffle House at 1 a.m.
Buc-ee’s.
Bottomless drinks.
Self-serve ice machines.
Ranch dressing.
Giant supermarkets.
Suburban houses with lawns so large they seem almost comically overbuilt.
Roads that go on forever.
Parking lots that look like small nations.
Restaurants where the server keeps coming back to ask if everything is okay.
Mexican restaurants where chips and salsa appear before you have ordered anything, as if the universe itself has decided to feed you.
I had seen a few stories about this in the media — the viral reactions, the food tours, the Europeans discovering Buc-ee’s, the Japanese fan marveling at American hospitality — so today I decided to go on a YouTube and TikTok safari. I wanted to see what the visitors themselves were seeing.
Honestly, it may be the best remedy for the Fourth of July blues I have found.
Because what comes through in these videos is not “America is perfect.” Far from it. Some visitors are baffled by tipping. Some are stunned by the heat. Some are overwhelmed by the car-dependence, the prices, the distances, the commercialism, the sheer bigness of everything.
But again and again, what also comes through is wonder. And a sense that what they had been told to expect — is not what they’re finding. It’s in that delta — between expectation and actual discovery, that some meaning pokes through.
So let’s take a look.
Here’s one sample. There are hundreds — just go to Youtube and search “World Cup Fans React to America”.
The America we no longer see
One of the strange things about living inside a country is that you stop seeing it. I feel like that shouldn’t happen to me. After all, I’ve lived as an expat overseas for half my adult life. For most of my life, that helped me appreciate America. Lately, not so much. On my latest installation, I arrived back in March 2025, fifteen months ago, after three years mostly in Nairobi. So my ability to see it with fresh eyes should be pretty good. But I can’t.
What happens to many of us, has happened to me.
You stop seeing the scale. You stop seeing the casual abundance. You stop seeing the habits that would strike an outsider as strange, generous, absurd, excessive, or beautiful.
You do not notice that the iced tea keeps refilling itself.
You do not notice that a gas station in Texas has become a tourist destination.
You do not notice that a suburban grocery store may contain more varieties of cereal, barbecue sauce, chips, frozen pizza, salad dressing, and sparkling water than some visitors have ever seen in one place.
You do not notice that Americans will casually drive two hours as if that is a normal distance to travel for dinner, a game, or a visit with friends.
You do not notice that our homes are often set back from the road, separated by lawns, driveways, garages, and a strange architectural confidence that says: yes, of course we need all this space.
Foreign visitors notice.
And because they are now documenting everything, the rest of us get to watch them notice.
ABC described these videos as a “viral subgenre” of World Cup content: visitors reacting not to famous attractions, but to everyday American life — supermarkets, self-serve ice, huge vehicles, refill stations, 24-hour retail, and unusually friendly customer service.
Here’s one I like because it’s not a big professional production — just a kiwi family sharing reactions to things that mostly qualify as everyday American life.
That phrase — everyday American life — is the key.
The thing being discovered is not the official America. It is not the America of speeches, slogans, campaigns, or embassy brochures. It is the America of errands.
And the errands, apparently, are kind of amazing.
Buc-ee’s as national monument
No single place seems to have captured this better than Buc-ee’s.
To Americans, Buc-ee’s is already a phenomenon: part gas station, part roadside market, part clean-bathroom cult, part theme park of snacks and brisket. But to foreign visitors, it seems to land with almost anthropological force.
One German fan reportedly went viral with a post marveling that this sprawling complex was, technically, a gas station. Others have treated Buc-ee’s less as a place to refuel than as a place to experience America in concentrated form: barbecue, beaver nuggets, endless drinks, spotless bathrooms, merchandise, abundance, efficiency, scale.
It is funny, of course. But it is also revealing.
Because Buc-ee’s is not beautiful in any traditional civic sense. It is not a cathedral, a museum, a town square, or a national park. It is a commercial object. A roadside object. A consumer object.
And yet it represents something real about America: the country’s almost deranged talent for taking a practical need — gas, bathrooms, snacks — and blowing it up into an experience.
There is something ridiculous about that.
There is also something impressive about it.
That is the tension running through a lot of these reactions. Visitors are not always admiring America in the way Americans might want to be admired. They are not necessarily saying, “What a noble republic.” They are saying, “I cannot believe this exists.”
And still, that is a form of awe.
The soft power of free refills
One of the funniest recurring points of fascination is the free refill.
To Americans, the bottomless soda is so ordinary that we barely register it. In much of the world, it is not ordinary at all. The idea that you buy a drink and then someone just keeps replenishing it can feel, to visitors, like a small act of lawless generosity.
The same goes for chips and salsa.
Axios highlighted a Japanese fan’s viral meditation on receiving free chips and salsa at a Mexican restaurant — a small American custom that he interpreted through the lens of gift-giving, obligation, gratitude, and hospitality. The post reportedly drew more than 16 million views.
That is the kind of detail I love, because it turns something almost invisible into a cultural text.
A basket of chips arrives.
The American thinks: yes, obviously.
The visitor thinks: what is the meaning of this gift?
And suddenly you realize that a country is made up of thousands of tiny rituals like that — little assumptions about abundance, friendliness, consumption, comfort, convenience, and obligation. Most of the time, we do not explain them because we do not know we are performing them.
The World Cup visitors are noticing the performance.
The friendliness problem
Another recurring surprise is that Americans are friendlier than many visitors expected.
This is delicate, because American friendliness can be real and artificial at the same time. Some of it is genuine warmth. Some of it is service culture. Some of it is the emotional labor of people working jobs that require cheerfulness whether they feel cheerful or not.
But the reaction from visitors is still striking.
They describe strangers helping them, servers chatting with them, people asking where they are from, fans being welcomed in cities they had never heard of before arriving. Axios called the moment a burst of American soft power and compared some visitors to “modern-day de Tocquevilles” discovering the country from the ground up.
There is something moving about that.
Especially now.
Because those of us who live here are exposed every day to the ugliest version of American public life: the cruelty, the threats, the conspiracy theories, the rage, the strongman fantasies, the exhaustion of watching democratic norms be treated as optional. That is real. It cannot be waved away by a nice waitress in Kansas City.
But the waitress is real too.
The stranger giving directions is real.
The fan in a bar buying a drink for someone from another country is real.
The family inviting a visitor to tailgate is real.
The person saying “Welcome to America” and meaning it is real.
And maybe part of the emotional trap of this moment is that we have become so focused — necessarily focused — on the worst of the country that we sometimes lose sight of the ordinary decency still operating underneath it.
Not as an excuse.
As a fact worth preserving.
The bigness of everything
Another thing visitors keep noticing is the physical scale of American life.
The houses. The lawns. The roads. The trucks. The supermarkets. The portions. The distances between things. The width of the sky.
The Wall Street Journal recently wrote about European soccer fans marveling at American suburbs — the size of the homes, the roads, the lots, and the space. One Dutch fan who had not even heard of Kansas City before the tournament found himself fascinated by the landscape of middle America.
This is where the reactions become more complicated.
Because from the outside, American space can look like freedom.
From the inside, it can also look like sprawl.
The big house may look like abundance, but it may also come with isolation, debt, maintenance, long commutes, and a life organized around cars.
The giant road may look liberating, but it may also mean there is no practical way to walk.
The enormous supermarket may look like prosperity, but it also sits inside a system of overconsumption, waste, processed food, and inequality.
This is why the videos are more interesting than simple patriotism. They do not prove that America is good. They reveal that America is strange.
And that strangeness contains both beauty and pathology.
The negatives are part of the mirror too
Of course, not every reaction is glowing.
Some visitors are baffled by tipping — and rightly so. American tipping culture is confusing even to Americans. For visitors from countries where service workers are paid differently and the listed price is closer to the real price, the U.S. system can feel like a trap: tax is added later, tip is expected, and the customer is suddenly made responsible for solving a labor compensation problem at the end of dinner.
Axios reported that some restaurants in World Cup host cities have added automatic 20 percent gratuities because many international visitors come from countries where tipping is not customary.
Then there is the heat.
Visitors from Europe, in particular, have had to confront the reality that American summer is not a background condition. In some places, it is an adversary. The same country that offers free refills also offers a sun that makes you understand why the refills became necessary in the first place.
There are complaints about stadium prices, travel costs, and the difficulty of moving around a country this large. Reuters reported before the tournament that high ticket prices, visa hurdles, expensive hotels and flights, and the logistics of a World Cup spread across three countries were already dampening some of the expected travel boom.
And then there is commercialization.
This is America too. The country that can turn a gas station into a beloved cultural experience can also turn almost anything into an opportunity for branding, upselling, monetization, and interruption. Even soccer — the global game — has had to make room for American-style commercial logic. Vox recently noted fan irritation over hydration breaks being used in a way that feels suspiciously close to television timeouts.
So no, the mirror is not all flattering.
But that is why it is useful.
The World Cup visitors are not showing us a fantasy America. They are showing us the actual one: generous and excessive, friendly and commercial, spacious and isolating, convenient and wasteful, joyful and absurd.
In other words: ours.
Why this hit me before July 4
Maybe this is why the whole thing landed for me today.
I do not need a sentimental version of America right now. I would not believe it anyway.
I do not need someone to tell me that everything is fine, because everything is not fine.
What I did need, apparently, was a reminder that America is not reducible to its worst political actors or its most dangerous impulses. It is not reducible to Trump, or the Supreme Court, or the rage machine, or the performative cruelty that now dominates so much of our public life.
Those things are real, and they demand confrontation.
But they are not the whole country.
The country is also a Japanese fan trying to understand free chips and salsa.
It is a German fan standing in a Buc-ee’s unable to process the scale of the place.
It is a Scottish fan discovering Waffle House.
It is a Dutch fan staring at the suburbs.
It is a visitor realizing that the server really is going to keep refilling the drink.
It is strangers being kinder than expected.
It is food that is too much, roads that are too wide, portions that are too large, houses that seem improbable, and a national genius for turning the mundane into spectacle.
It is ridiculous.
It is excessive.
It is often indefensible.
And sometimes, despite everything, it is still kind of wonderful.
The ordinary country
There is an old habit, especially around the Fourth of July, of trying to locate patriotism in abstractions: freedom, democracy, founding ideals, national purpose.
Those things matter. They matter enormously. And this year, the gap between the language of freedom and the actual condition of our politics may feel especially hard to bear.
But the World Cup visitors have reminded me that countries are also made of ordinary things.
A counter seat at Waffle House.
A basket of chips.
A refill.
A suburban street.
A stranger’s welcome.
A roadside stop so oversized it becomes a civic experience.
Maybe that is not enough for a full patriotic revival. Maybe it should not be. Nobody should be asked to forget what is happening to the country because a tourist liked ranch dressing.
But it is enough, maybe, for a small correction.
Enough to remember that there is still an America beneath the noise.
Enough to see that the country still has powers of welcome, abundance, improvisation, and everyday warmth that outsiders can sometimes see more clearly than we can.
Enough to step into the Fourth of July with a little less despair than I had yesterday.
Not because America is fine.
Because ordinary America, somehow, is still there.
And for the moment, the world is helping us see it.
MS Note: Thanks for takingt this little ride with me. It perked me up. Hope it perks you up too.
https://abcnews.com/GMA/Living/world-cup-visitors-viral-reactions-everyday-american-life/story?id=133927192
https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Travel/FIFA-world-cup-tourists-love-american-food/story?id=133921609
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/20/world-cup-tourists
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/21/world-cup-service-fees-tipping-culture
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/european-soccer-fans-marvel-at-the-splendor-of-americas-suburbs-a04f1b88
https://www.fastcompany.com/91561992/world-cup-boosting-american-brands
https://www.delish.com/food-news/a71571515/international-world-cup-fans-react-american-foods/
https://www.salon.com/2026/06/17/world-cup-fans-fall-for-waffle-house/
https://www.salon.com/2026/06/28/world-cup-visitors-love-ranch-dressing-bu-cees-and-bbq/
https://qz.com/world-cup-visitors-losing-minds-over-american-foods
https://www.chron.com/food/article/fifa-world-cup-restaurant-tipping-22315703.php
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/forecast-says-90-pavement-says-120-dallass-world-cup-heat-trap-2026-06-29/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/30/world-cup-matches-extreme-heat
https://www.reuters.com/sports/soccer/tales-16-world-cup-cities-2026-07-02/
https://nypost.com/2026/06/28/lifestyle/japanese-tourist-reacts-to-american-hospitality/
https://nypost.com/2026/06/29/lifestyle/the-5-friendliest-u-s-cities-according-to-world-cup-tourists/
For social/video hunting, these searches should turn up the clips you want:
https://www.tiktok.com/search?q=world%20cup%20fans%20america%20waffle%20house
https://www.tiktok.com/search?q=world%20cup%20fans%20bucees
https://www.tiktok.com/search?q=world%20cup%20fans%20free%20refills
https://www.tiktok.com/search?q=world%20cup%20fans%20american%20food
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=world+cup+fans+react+to+america+waffle+house
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=world+cup+fans+buc-ee%27s+america
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=world+cup+visitors+react+to+american+food
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=world+cup+fans+america+free+refills
This was interesting and your writing, as always, is clear and expressive. The content raised a question in my mind though, about all the good things extended to strangers but withheld from such a significant portion of the residents.
George Carlin talked about loving to meet individuals but hating groups of people. I think you’re sorta saying the same thing Michael. Most individuals are at minimum benign, but often friendly & generous. That’s what our visitors are discovering when they meet Americans. But when you put people in a group the evolutionary instinct towards tribalism and hierarchy kicks in. And tribalism is t a but, it’s a feature, a deep feature of human cognitive architecture, as fundamental as language and as ingrained as the sex drive. People just can’t help themselves in groups.