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BS ‘n’ About…
The Good Guys
The America we pledged our Baby Boom allegiance to was the obvious, undisputed, no-doubt-about-it Good Guy. It was the other guys who started the wars, tortured the prisoners, cheated at the Olympics, and built walls around their country. Though far from perfect, for the most part we played by the rules, even when it hurt.
But we have changed much as a people and as a nation since those days. Now we’re the ones starting the wars, torturing the prisoners, cheating at the Olympics, and building walls around our country. We’re a nation drowning in fear and driven by greed. We cheat in politics. We cheat in business. We cheat in sports.
Internationally, we’re bludgeoning half the nations on Earth with our diplomatic and military power, while exploiting the other half to satisfy our economic excesses. Domestically, we turn more into a police state every day. As a people and as a nation, we seem to have no vision beyond getting rich without regard for the price, feeling safe without regard for the consequences.
As recently as the day before Pearl Harbor, we were a rich, isolationist nation with no real standing army and very few diplomatic entanglements. We were held in general respect by the nations of the world and viewed as the Promised Land for those dreaming of freedom. The symbol of America was the Statue of Liberty.
Today, America is an over-extended, overly-entangled debtor nation with an economy-draining, technologically fragile army sitting in the middle of what might or might not be a civil war. …laying the foundation for what might or might not be Armageddon. We have more enemies than friends and our business and political leaders seem to attract hordes of protestors every time they step out of the country. The Constitution is being interpreted in unprecedented ways that will have people leaving America to find freedom. Like it or not, the symbol of 21st century America had become the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
We are no longer the nation as represented by that flag in our first grade classrooms. Fundamentally, we are the opposite of that nation in many, many ways. We’re not quite ‘the Evil Empire’, but we’re no longer the obvious, undisputed, no-doubt-about-it Good Guys either. We won the Cold War but seem to have lost our way. …and our friends.
When the Soviet system crumbled from within, America had the unprecedented opportunity to shape the future for all of mankind, and the respect to actually have a chance of pulling it off. As the world’s melting pot and only remaining Superpower, we had the diplomatic, economic, and cultural might to bring the nations of the world together in common cause.
A little bit of vision could have resulted in peace summits and widespread demobilization, sharing the wealth and protecting the environment, sharing the power and providing for our future. America could have seen to it that the Saddam Husseins of this world weren’t armed to the teeth. …that the New Orleans’ of this world were prepared for the inevitable. …that our kids and elders were truly being cared for. With a little bit of vision we could have seen to it that no one hated us enough to fly airplanes into buildings full of our fellow citizens.
It wasn’t all that long ago that our borders were open, yet we felt safe, both home and abroad. When our soldiers marched through a town they were greeted as liberators and showered with flowers. Washington was interpreting the Constitution to expand personal freedoms, civil rights, and social services. We were the obvious, undisputed, no-doubt-about-it Good Guys.
We no longer are. What we are is a young, idealistic, for the most part well-intentioned nation way over our geo-political heads in cultures and conflicts thousands of years older than our Constitution. With the naive assuredness of youth, we assume we have all the answers for the cultural clashes of Europe, the ancestral conflicts of Asia, and the spiritual Armageddon that is the Middle East.
Our stock answer is to hold an election, call it democracy, and open up the market to the appetites of Wall Street. We graft a framework of our political and economic system onto a thousand years of culture totally foreign to our own, then sit back appalled and surprised when we end up with yet another petty dictator, graft-driven economy, and exploited peasantry that hates us. We should have learned our lesson in Vietnam. …or Iran. …or the Philippines. Obviously we didn’t.
To think that we could bomb Iraq into the Stone Age, then anoint ourselves arbiter of Iraqi justice and architect of the future of the Iraqi nation was ridiculous from the get-go. These people speak a different language, conduct business differently, raise their families differently, worship God differently, and didn’t like us all that much in the first place. There’s not much about our way of life that they seem to respect or want. They didn’t ask for our help and don’t seem to want it now that we’re they’re. We were led to believe that our sons and daughters in uniform were going to be showered with flowers and greeted as liberators when they marched into Baghdad. What were we thinking!
We might mean well but we’re turning into bullies. We’re turning into the Bad Guys. When the Cold War ended, the world turned to us for leadership and we’ve led it into the past, settling the same old disputes in the same old selfish ways. We rattle sabers and throw our weight around. We do everything in our power to keep Wall Street rich. We’ve alienated our allies and enraged our enemies. We’ve stolen from our kids and impoverished our elders. We’ve shown none of the kind of vision and courage that gave us the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or the Emancipation Proclamation. …the Monroe Doctrine, the New Deal, the Marshall Plan, or the Civil Rights Act.
These days we’re a nation of Patriot Acts, Homeland Security, Guantanamo Bay, and Operation Desert Somethings. Under our watch, the world has grown more dangerous. We grossly over-reacted to an act of terrorism, the likes, if not the scale, of which our allies had been enduring for decades. How could we have alienated those same allies when, in many ways, the war on terrorism is more their war than ours? September 11th was the kind of event that the Good Guys could have used to unite the nations of the world. It could have marked an end to the killing, not just another beginning.
America has never, ever, ever been the nation that started the wars, tortured the prisoners, spied on its people, or cut corners with the Constitution. Freedom is a function of living in peace, feeling safe, and not having too much regulation or police presence. Democracy implies that the decisions and the riches of the nation will be distributed fairly.
These days America stands for neither freedom, nor democracy. We might not want to hear it, and our hearts won’t want to buy it, but we’re not the obvious, undisputed, no-doubt-about-it Good Guy anymore. It seems that ought to hurt a lot more than it does. Sad.
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