OT:Mqurice- Your post is a reminder to me that no matter how much I admire your All Blacks, the political leanings of NZ are best left to the backwater.
Your criticism of America is in many respects misplaced (for example, it really would've been better for Vietnam if the US had won the Vietnam War, and the Americans who fought and died in that conflict are deserving of your admiration and respect, whether or not you choose to extend it to them)and in other respects , like so many others on the left, you simply draw the wrong inferences from the facts.
It is a shopworn tactic of this country's critics to refer to a court case here, a racial incident there, and from that express their indignation over how far America falls short of perfection, which would certainly be achieved if only people did things their way.
The more accurate measuring stick is the real world, and the real world tells us that America did not invent cultural hegemony, slavery or racism, that it in fact exists in much more virulent forms around the world (Hutus and Tutsis, Hindus and Sikhs, Arabs and Jews, Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants,Shiites and Sunnis,Serbs and Croats, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, etc.),that there is no country on earth where so many racial and cultural groups peacefully coexist with one another,and over the last 100 years there is no country to which the world turns with such regularity whenever the mad visionary looms with menace on the horizon.
We celebrate our country not because we are under some delusion that it is free from all faults. We celebrate our country because of all we have done to advance the cause of freedom around the world, and because we are grateful for the freedom, domestic peace and opportunity it affords us relative to what is found elsewhere, even as we strive to make it better.
I think someone expressed the opinion on this forum yesterday that America's one true ally is England. Sadly, posts like yours remind me of how true that is. |
