Ramblings -- what's so great about the USA?
When I was a kid my parents, trying to instill patriotism, told me a lot of stories.
There was the one about how in the US the legal system is the best in the world, even if not perfect. People aren't thrown in jail without trial and never heard from again or tortured.
I was told we a had a free press that didn't lie to us, like the press in the USSR that published propaganda.
I was told that in some countries the government spied on it's own people, but not here.
The last few months it's become well known that the USA isn't above any of those crimes that my parents assured me were practices in other less free countries.
I can't count how many times I was told that while the US isn't perfect, it's the best country on the planet. I haven't traveled all that widely, but I was surprised to find in my brief visits to Canada, England and (even more briefly) in France, that those countries seemed just as free as(and in a few cases, free-er than)the US.
When I was a kid I remember feeling awed that I lived in the best country on earth. The conclusions that I began to have were that I must be very special and have a special destiny to be born here.
I would watch the Olympic medal totals and took each one the US earned to mean that we were a chosen people. Even when East Germany or the USSR had more, I put it down to their athletes having an unfair advantage by being supported to train full time.
I became very wrapped up in the idea of my country's, and by extension, my special-ness. It took quite a bit to get me to look at reality -- some history, some awarness of US domestic and foreign policy, some personal experience of the world.
There are a lot of people that need to hold on to that feeling of special-ness. They keep telling themselves that we are the chosen nation, God blesses us, others hate us for our freedoms -- all to convince themselves that they are more important than someone else somewhere else.
It's a dangerous way of thinking. It's blinds some people to the evil that is perpetrated by our government, which in turn gives our government a blank check to do what it will. It makes some people not only complacent about war, but cheerleaders, eager for a battle that most of them won't be fighting.
With all the news recently showing just how corrupt our government is, will there finally be an end to the self-brainwashing mantra of, "The US is the best there is"? Will we finally be able to look at ourselves honestly without fear of being labeled "un-American"? Or will we hear it more often and louder as folks try to drown out the bad news that there's a lot we need to work on to make this country one to be proud of? I hope it will help us to see ourselves for the flawed country that we are, so that we can get busy changing things for the better.