Maybe I’m just extremely gullible. Or maybe my massive, bleeding heart has swollen so badly that I have learned to love too many things (like my country, and my world); but this week, I finally had to break down, and get really angry about the direction that world events are going in. Remember when you were a kid, how you’d believe almost anything that any older, seemingly wiser-than-you kid told you; like the fact that if you swallow bubblegum it will take seven years for your body to digest it? Well, It seems to me that most Americans tend to trust Bush’s word on American progress with the same sense of credulity. But really, public polls are a manipulated ‘statistic’ at best, and most of the public opinions you read about are just as biased as your version of that office Christmas party story while your significant other rolls their eyes and knows what really happened that night you decided to get completely wasted in front of everyone you work with.
The point that I’m trying to make is that I don’t think anyone in America is bothering to take the time to question the veracity of public news anymore. We have either learned to ignore the headlines that are too shocking, or we tune into a biased news program that concentrates on weather, local issues, and has a slant that we share. But how is it that anyone can think that the media’s report on progress, or the lack thereof, is more plausible than rumors about bubble gum digestion? It’s all just opinion. Humans are products of how they’ve assembled the knowledge that they’ve collected. We are the sum of what we’ve chosen to have faith in and what we’ve chosen to disregard as untruths. And the result is that people compose a moral spectrum that can include justifying perennial war and a large standing army in exchange for an illusion of safety.
So my question this week is, how can so many people be willing to put up with the Bush Administration and our current foreign diplomacy? Is it because America has turned into a nation of selfish, pampered yuppies who don’t really care what happens to the rest of the world, so long as we are not being attacked here on our home soil? How many of you honestly felt crushed when London’s subways were attacked a year ago? And what about when Spain endured its terrorism attack earlier that spring? And how many of you cried your eyes out at the thought of those poor train travelers in India a week ago who lost their lives from terrorist attacks? Are you demanding that something be done, do you want to send soldiers to these nations, or does this thought only occur to you when your eyes are forced to reckon with live footage of planes killing a few thousand Americans?
I don’t know how to explain my predicament, because I feel like I’m in an overcrowded boat; I feel like a whiny, political activist-dilettante. I feel as though I am hand cuffed to “the way things are,” and I’m not really sure if I believe that things can change for the better before they get a lot worse—and that frightens me more than any other fear. But this week, with all of the chaotic reports from the Middle East, my sense of outrage has begun to boil over, and this is because I feel like so many people feel the same way that I do; and yet we have shrugged our shoulders and become an army of apathy. I feel like the public consensus is that since we’re stuck inside a hole that we’ve dug (the war in Iraq), we may as well dig deeper, and hope that this works out better than simply withdrawing our troops. But I agree that you can’t solve a problem that you helped create, by giving up, and praying that it goes away—unless you’re Kenneth Lay.
I think the problem with America is the “yuppification” of former revolutionarily minded citizens, and I don’t just mean the baby boomers—I’m calling out my sarcastic generation on this issue as well. Some people may be offended by my use of the term yuppie—so allow me to explain. Here’s a quick questionnaire: Did you ever feel that you could personally create social change but now laugh that idea off as naive? Do you shake your head when you drive past a rally or protest? Did you trade in a Honda for a Saab at any point in your life? Do you use words like ‘svelte’ in conjunction with ‘my body’ to describe your New Year’s Eve goal, instead of ‘world peace’? Does your car have wipers for its headlights? Do you order ultra light beers, after walking (not running) on a treadmill at a gym while you watched stock quotes or The View? Are you entitled to things like the closest parking spot at the grocery store, the right of way over other cars on narrow streets, and the perfect latte that’s not too hot, but hot enough to magically stay the same temperature over your forty minute long commute to work? When you hear on television that a man is being tried for child molestation, do you instantly assume that he is guilty, and if you have children, do you believe in the death penalty, because “it’s the only way to remove certain monsters from our society?” And finally, do you think that any American who makes less than $30,000 a year is near, at, or below the poverty line?
If you answered yes to more than two of these questions; be warned; you may be a yuppie, and if you answered yes to a lot of those questions, then you are one. And here’s the problem with becoming a yuppie; the rest of the world hates American yuppies more than anything else on Earth, and they want to eradicate our yuppie lifestyle to the extent that they are willing to use any tactics that they can to defeat the yuppie lifestyle. Now, you may be thinking, “well, that’s awful, and unfair, because we didn’t do anything to these people. America is prosperous because we took advantage of our incredible work ethic, natural resources, and patriotic duty to get where we are, and we deserve to enjoy it.” If you believe this, then you better go sit on the toilet, because I think that gum you accidentally swallowed seven years ago is about ready to come out. It’s time to stop looking through a cracked mirror, America, and time to see us for what we really are.
A large portion of the world hates us for a lot of reasons: There are trivial reasons, like the fact that we don’t really care about the World Cup, and we call our baseball championship the World Series, even though it doesn’t include any other nation, except one team in Canada. Politically, our leaders commonly refer to our nation on TV as the best, and most powerful nation on earth. And the worst part is that we feel entitled to making demands on other nations, while ignoring unilateral demands on us, like the Kyoto Treaty for helping to save the environment. Doesn’t all of this make us sound like that Bully you grew up with, the one who made up all the rules to the games, always won each game, and then taunted you with how much better he was than you after each victory? Who didn’t, and still doesn’t want to take revenge against some bully from their past? Most people don’t forget nor forgive oppression easily. I know I don’t.
“But Mike, what has America done to any of these countries that hate us? I thought that we simply defended freedom and spread democracy throughout the world?” Well, that’s not exactly true. In the fifties, we attacked the slightly lesser of two evils and backed up a nasty militant South Korea against a nasty, communist militant North Korea. And we still have almost 50,000 U.S. troops deployed in South Korea today. You think Iraq is going to turn out any differently? It's probably not. Welcome to South Korea Part II, Iraq is another neo-colonial outpost for our military to extend and flex its military muscles.
More of our not-so-favorable American History chapters includes our 19th century ethnic bias of Chinese people which allowed us to create a railroad-building slavery system, a ban on opium in order to jail dissident Chinese, and until the Nixon Administration, a refusal to trade with China in order to undercut their economic growth. To this day, we continually threaten China with our military power, because they are a communist nation, and communism is considered by most of our politicians as an adversary to our democratic ideals and American way of life. In the eighties, for nearly seven years, we funded Saddam Hussein and Iraq with money and loads of weapons to fund his nation's war against Iran in order to help our nation secure oil and oil for dollar trade in the Middle East. This process created what to this day remains a bitter hatred of America by most of Iran's political leaders, as well as many other Middle-Eastern nation's leaders.
And Russia? If I need to remind you of just how recently we thought that Russians were out to nuke our entire country to kingdom come and truly believed that they hated us enough to risk the planet’s future by mass producing nuclear weapons, then you must have been born after 1988, the year the Berlin Wall fell. That’s less than twenty years ago, so if you can drink legally, here in the states, then I hope that you can claim at the very least a cursory remembrance of our international policies towards communism. Sure, you may have forgiven Russia, and want to say, “c’mon Ruskies, let bygones be bygones,” but that’s easy for you to say, because you are an American, and you won the Cold War. To the average Russian over the age of twenty, America is still a bully, and Russia is that small part of you who still yearns for redemption against a force that once displaced your social position and well being. I think that most of you can relate to this analogy, so try and put on the other shoe, and think about how and why our enemies could truly feel that we deserve some revenge.
I’m not rooting for us to fall, nor am I predicting anything of the sort: Instead, I’m calling on Americans to push for the opposite, I’m asking for Americans to resume voicing their opinions again. Let the world know that many of us care about more than the preservation of our American lifestyle. I want to see us resume the debate over whether or not Mr. Bush and his cabinet are a bunch of liars, manipulators, and thereby corrupt, and unworthy leaders. There is nothing wrong with believing in a truth that many others do not seem to see, or more importantly, do not want to see. Humans are capable of burning visionary geniuses like Copernicus at the stake for stressing that the status quo is wrong, even though they are right. There is nothing wrong, nor unpatriotic about standing up and asserting an opinion, like the opinion that our president has made some truly awful and dangerous decisions, and that these decisions have led our nation into a very real and violent world dilemma—Bush, the self proclaimed "decider" has compiled the largest debt in the history of the modern world, mostly by pursuing the ghosts of Osama Bin Laden and Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East -- and its not just America that has to pay an enormous price for his policies.
Bush, internationally, has become a joke—but a joke that gets less and less funny to the rest of the world every single day. He recently tried to bully Russia on economic issues, at the G-8 conference, where he was politely told by Russian President Vladimir Putin that America doesn’t get its way anymore; because Russia and China are as big and powerful as we are—and Bush couldn’t retort, because Putin was right, and he knew it. Then Bush got caught on camera making trite, crass remarks about the fiasco in the Middle East. Events like these happen nearly every time Bush sets foot on the international stage! Remember when Bush declared the Iraq war over in 2003? He was obviously wrong, because our troop numbers have actually increased since this supposed ending to the war, and he commonly still refers to the situation in Iraq as a war, in the present tense. His administration has admitted that they didn’t have the evidence they claimed to have prior to our invasion of Iraq, and this is at best the most stupid, careless error in world history, and at worst, a full on deceit of our entire nation. Are you paying attention to how misinformed, yet arrogant this man is–the man who is the face for our country to the rest of the world–a man with two years left in office? To me, it seems like Bush is trying to outduel his father in an "inappropriate foreign diplomacy blunder battle," with the benchmark for success being the time that Bush Senior famously puked all over the dinner table while dining with the prime minister of Japan.
I guess that in the great modern war of morality, the yuppies are winning, and Bush and Co. are tagging along for the wild ride. I guess I should learn to relax, and let go, and sit by and watch Israel blow up a nation that I know very little about, and while I am at it, I can also let various African nations commit massive genocides upon their own populaces, since it’s taking place on their barren, oil free ground. Am I missing something here? Is it perhaps practical to spread peace to nations with natural resources that we depend on, ignore those who don't have any resources we are interested in, and all the while perfectly legit to defend our lifestyle at the cost of our own environment? If it is, then please send me to Iraq so that I too can risk my life so that upper class Americans can still afford to drive unnecessarily large cars with windshield wiper headlights to the drive-thru at Starbuck’s on their way to work, all the while text messaging each other about where to meet in the evening to drink ultra light beers, which they drink in order to remain svelte. And can you see emperor Bush’s new suit? Darn it! I can’t.