By Madeleine Farr | Special to the Courier

I find it exceedingly embarrassing to be an American. I’ve sat on the couch for several minutes trying to select the best examples as to why I feel that way, and I’m overwhelmed.

All one really needs to do to understand this is to step outside of U.S. borders. From familial conversations to mass media-presented debates, our country’s political landscape portrays two warring sides of relatively equal size and, oftentimes, legitimacy.

Prior to arriving at Pitzer College, where I am a rising junior, I spent a year traveling with my two best friends working in exchange for accommodation and food. We primarily used Workaway, a website designed to put those in need of labor in touch with those in need of accommodation, to find our next destination.

Three years later, I set up a new, solo Workaway profile. I’ve subsequently found myself spending half my summer on Australia’s stunning Scotland Island. They say it’s wintertime here, but I’m having trouble believing it.

Some Scotland Island residents were born in Sydney, about an hour’s drive away, while others hail from more distant Australian regions. Some were born and raised on the island, which I find incredibly fascinating — taking a ferry daily to school, coming home to a land mass that takes less than an hour to circle entirely by foot.

I’ve met people of all ages, but have spent the most time with a community of folks my parents’ age who work out together at sunrise in the island’s only park. They call it boot camp, and since I arrived about two weeks ago, I’ve had the pleasure of attending.

Boot camp takes place Tuesdays and Thursdays at seven in the morning. Though early hours terrified me before coming here (during two weeks in New York I regularly slept until afternoon), jet lag allowed me to embrace them.

When I told my newfound friends I, an American, was studying politics, I was met with some shock and lots of laughter; not malicious laughter, but amusement stemming from the state of American politics. Why would someone choose to study its madness?

I was surprised to find that these new friends — none of them American — were intrigued by my thoughts on the state of our nation. In my experience, too often Americans avoid discussing politics, as the polarization has grown too intense to make any conversation worth having. This is especially true among young people, who often have little time together. Why ruin a good time with a topic that might end in multiple feuds?

I expected this reticence (perhaps naively, in hindsight) to persist on Scotland Island. The houses here are quite nice. Some residents view the island as a vacation spot rather than a primary residence. In other words, I suspect a good number of Scotland Islanders are not strapped for cash. Ignorantly, I then ascribed to them the same attitude that I’ve witnessed so many times in the spaces I occupy in the U.S., which are largely wealthy as well.

In the U.S., there are countless political issues framed as if they have two equally valid sides. Many do, but some — gun control regarding school shootings is an easy example — do not. In America, the deaths of children in classrooms are treated as a political battleground, with debates centering around the Second Amendment, mental health funding, or arming teachers. Conservatives fight to protect what they feel is their right to semi-automatic weapons, and pro-gun control liberals provide lip service to worried parents. The media, lawmakers, and pundits treat the issue seriously, as though there’s genuine ambiguity about whether it’s okay for children to be gunned down in their schools.

Australia has only had one mass shooting, in April 1996 when 35 people were killed. It didn’t happen in a school. The Australian Prime Minister at the time, John Howard, immediately enacted sweeping gun control legislation. “The hardest things to do in politics often involve taking away rights and privileges from your own supporters,” Howard said at the time. Semi-automatic and automatic weapons were removed from circulation, among other measures.

Outside the U.S., school shootings don’t spark debate.

“I thought they handed you a gun the second you stepped into first grade,” one of my new Scotland Island friends jokingly said to me one evening. “No, they’re only for the teachers,” another stepped in to reply.

The continued occurrence of mass shootings in the U.S. is viewed as an absurdity abroad. People joke about them, not out of cruelty, but because the American position is so morally incomprehensible it sounds fictional. It’s this jarring dissonance between deadly seriousness in the U.S. and morbid comedy elsewhere that makes the American situation feel all the more surreal and shameful.

I don’t expect most people reading this, including my fellow students at the Claremont Colleges, are against legislation to better regulate the availability semi-automatic weapons in America. Nevertheless, many of my fellow students have not stepped outside of the U.S. in a way that forces them to interact regularly with people in other countries, as Workaway does. The experience provides perspective that cannot be gleaned elsewhere.

You don’t find 7 a.m. boot camp when you travel and stay in a resort.

Madeleine Farr, a rising Pitzer College junior studying politics and writing, is senior news editor at the Claremont Colleges student newspaper The Student Life.