The Midwestern state seemed like a perfect world when Tammy Johnson taught a Swiss exchange student in 1996. There was little sign of today’s polarization. Now they meet again and ask themselves: What just happened?
It was a storybook America in which a teenager landed in 1996, who will write this text almost 30 years later. The new school friends drove their own cars and lived in huge houses on properties the size of the football field behind the high school. With the friendliness of the Midwest, the European was welcomed in Wales, half an hour away from Milwaukee, the largest city in Wisconsin.