America is quite possibly the closest thing to this utopian, "I'm okay, you're okay, do your own thing, we're all so special and unique", society that the world has known, at least since the dawn of the industrial age. That should be obvious to anybody reading this thread. Only in a country such as this do people have the luxury of a public forum where they can carry on, ad nauseum, about what horrible people we all are for having a good life and how immoral it is for us to do anything to insure that we keep it. In much of the rest of the world the discussions would involve such mundane things as "Gosh darn! We have five million citizens and food for less than half of those" or "Golly gee, I wonder if our those darn old Hutus are going to slaughter any more of my family tonight or if I'll be able to get a good night's sleep instead".
The only possible excuse I can find for those of you who find the U.S. so materialistic and brutally amoral in our dealing with the rest of the world is that you have been shielded for your entire life in this hotbed of greed and imperialism. You don't really have any idea about how really shitty it is in some parts or the world or how it actually came to be that way. You get your compassionate humanism from watching Sally Struthers cry on T.V. and your middle class guilt from listening to REM drone on about the plight of the godless proletariat while drinking your Starbucks Blue Mountain Mocha.
I suggest that the lot of you, get off of your collective asses, away from your new Gateway PC, put down your L.L. Bean catalog and actually make a serious effort to find out what is really going on in the world. The ideal way for you to do that would be to spend at least a year amongst the masses in your choice of any number of third world locales. Preferably one where you can see how the emissaries of the U.S., military, medical, economic, social, actually interact with these masses as opposed to how they interact with their own government or with each other. A year should be enough for you to come back and say that what we have here is probably the best thing going in the world and as such is worth fighting for to preserve. We will never be able to force our standard of living on anyone else. We can't make them shake the bonds of fascism, tribalism, racism, militarism. We can help, but it's something they have to do for themselves. We have proven irrefutably that you can't fight for someone else's freedom if they won't fight for it themselves. Nor can we step into an internecine war, especially those that are ethnic, religious. or tribal in nature and expect to force peace. It just will not work. These wars, whether in Somalia, Croatia, Sri Lanka, or Burundi have only one inevitable outcome and that is the eventual victory of one side and the eradication of the other. The only "fair" thing we could do to force an end to such a conflict would be to step in and eradicate both sides, declaring peace when there is no one left to fight. The U.S. cannot be held accountable for all of the world's ills. The best we can do in some cases is to contain such a conflict and protect our own interests. At the same time we are not obligated to bring ourselves down to the economic level of the poorest of nations, just to show them that we feel solidarity with them.
As heinous as nationalism is to several of you on this thread, it is necessary for our survival. The family of nations is more like a herd of opportunistic carnivores than a family. There are a few, a very few, that could be counted to stand with the U.S. if the chips were down and we were vulnerable. The rest of them, even those that are obstensibly "family" would turn on us and rip our throats out, the second they thought they had the advantage.
The U.S. must continue to preserve our standard of living by dealing with the rest of the world from a position of strength. We already do more for the benefit of the world's needy than any other nation and popular myth to the contrary, ask for nothing in return. If 99% of the rest of the nations in the world had achieved the level of strength, economically, militarily, and technologically that we have achieved they would have pressed their advantage over the rest of the world as soon as the odds were in their favor. Much can be said for us as a nation that we have wielded such overwhelming power as a weapon so infrequently and our detractors notwithstanding, with such restraint
As much as you coffee house philosophers would claim otherwise, the best thing the U.S. can do is take care of it's own interests, while standing as an example to other nations of what is possible if they are willing to work for it, fight for it, and maintain it. |
