(no subject)
i'm really sick and have done basically nothing but lay around for the past five days, so i've had a lot of time to think. i can't wait to go to rome and actually be somewhere with a history! we do not have a history. we have less than 250 years. we're hardly even a blip on the radar of human history and it disgusts me that we think so highly of ourselves as a country to think that we have this rich culture. what culture? our country has nothing that binds us together as a nation. i'm not being anti-american and i'm not saying that i am not proud to be a citizen of this country, but i simply think that we get way to big for our britches a lot of the time. i think that all of this stems from the part of me that still wants to study ancient, or even just old, cultures. i watched the hbo movie 'elizabeth I' today and it was wonderful. it was incredibly well done, and i'll be damned if she wasn't an amazing woman. she reined in the 16th century when england had long been a country. they already had a real history by the time she reigned and it's still around. we have less than 250 years of war and progress. we're a baby nation and somehow we rule the world. no wonder other countries hate us. we're like that new kid who comes to school and immediately becomes the most popular person in school while everyone else is left behind. i'm not saying that we aren't deserving of this, but it's just a little hard to fit in my head sometimes. i don't want us to become more power-hungry and bigger. we are not an empire. we are a country. we need not spread the american way across the world in an endless bloody crusade of sorts. i love the diversity of our planet, and some of the things that we are changing do not need to be changed. some should be, in the cases of threats to our own soil and people. in that case, when there is an immediate danger to the american people, then i will accept our changing of others, but otherwise... it's a really bitter pill for me to swallow. i want our country to have the chance to make a real history and not fall into obscurity like the holy roman empire. they were the main power once as well. they thought they were doing the right thing, too. it's true that we aren't a direct comparison to the holy roman empire, but i think that you can understand my point. i think that if we are to become the great nation we believe ourselves to be, then we need to work a little harder on internal affairs. find some way to bond together our nation in a real way. the way in which the american people came together after 9/11 was beautiful and felt strengthening, but it didn't last. why can't we have that all the time? maybe it's because we don't have the history. we can't say, "well, we've been through this and this and this and this..." and have it span back for a millenia like many nations of the world can. maybe this is all just incessant babble brought on by mono, or maybe it's something more. i guess i'll never know.