Thing #1 – I count some of the Americans I have met, personally, on my travels, or through FB, as some of the finest people with whom I have ever come into contact – kind, generous, and helpful to a lost soul on his trike passing through.
Thing #2 – Please take this in the spirit with which it is presented.
You guys down there have totally fucked up. Somehow. Someway. And it’s basically because as the world’s policeman you have had to develop your military to the point that it is a huge honour (honor) to have fought in Iraq, Afghanistan. Vietnam, not so much, but that’s another story for another JuicyLesson.
When a guy loses a limb in a desert thousands of miles away from home it is tragic. Making the ultimate sacrifice is even more tragic and Gold Star Families are highly respected, as well they should be. Kids killed in the prime of their lives, creating endless sorrow for parents who have lost a child or children, and not to mention the effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which puts some returning veterans into their own private hells, regardless of the fact that your president would call that being weak.
Why? Because the role that you have chosen for yourselves, most graciously, is to protect the world from dictatorships of the military variety, rather than from the United Fruit Company, and numerous other international corporations which in themselves were/are economic oligarchies, again a story for another time. So speaking purely from a military stand-point, as divorced as possible from capitalism, you have put yourselves in a paradoxical situation.
You were an isolationist country until World War I (1914-1918), declared in 1917, only a year before the end of hostilities. You refused to participate in the League of Nations because you believed that your own national interest superseded in importance that of the international community of nations and that if there were a conflict between the notion of collective security, the underlying principle of both the League and the U.N., by which an attack against one nation in the organization was to be regarded as an attack against them all, and your own national interest, you would not opt for the latter. So you chose to stay out, leaving the League basically powerless to prevent the aggression in the inter-war period which led to the outbreak of World War II (1939 to 1945).
More power to you. You were being honest saying that your own interests were most important to you at that time in history.
Then came “the change”.
You decided to make the world safe for democracy ** and hence the emphasis on the military and its development.
** This was actually the philosophy espoused by President Wilson and which provided the basis of his so-called Fourteen Points for Peace. These points were presented by Wilson to Lloyd George of Great Britain, and Premier Daladier of France in the immediate aftermath of World War I in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference. Unfortunately, the American Senate vetoed the American membership in the League and since the Americans refused to join, they didn’t actually take any action to make the world safe for democracy until after the war ended, in 1945. Actually, you guys probably got involved as the international policeman after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour and your subsequent (thanks, Mahlon, man) declaration of war against the Axis powers on December 7th, 1941.
Boy, I was actually questioned in NYC as to why I didn’t stand up, remove my cap, and pay homage to that great country of YOURS, prior to a Mets game. My answer could have been that I am handicapped and can’t stand well, or that I don’t stand for any anthem but I chose the truth – I am Canadian. There was nothing he could have said except to go off and tell me that I should have respected their anthem regardless of my nationality and maybe he would have been right and I may have apologized but he didn’t. And neither did I.
Disney World, Main Street, USA, the greatest country in the world. Maybe. The point is that you have put yourselves in a position (or maybe you have been put in a position), as the world’s protectors, and that is why you talk and act the way you do. There ARE other ways of life, you know. What makes yours so superior? Once again you have no choice but to believe that it’s America first.
Hence your lax gun laws and the second amendment. In Canada, to tell you the truth, I wouldn’t know where to buy a gun whereas that pig, Dylann Roof, not only procured one at the ripe old age of 19, but also went into a Charleston SC church and shot up the place, killing nine innocent people.
Apparently its an unbreakable cycle. Every propaganda tool available to man, both subliminal and not, is designed to inculcate in you the belief that the USA is the greatest : honouring veterans at every sporting event I have ever attended down there, commercials for the military, film (American Sniper, for example), the list is too numerous to go through.
Indeed a difficult situation.
It’s tough. Untenable and with a guy who would rather launch a nuke than admit that he’s neither liked nor respected by the sane among us, with a guy like that in power, maybe the cycle will break. Thank God, I’m getting on and I have no family. Who knows where the time goes.
Si tu dois partir, va t’en
Si non, tu dois rester la nuit.
(If you have to leave, then just go.
If not, you have to stay the night.)