Sticking it to "Enlightened America"

IF YOU BELIEVE the United States is a nation that should send food, clothes or people over to the more impoverished areas of the world, you are wrong.

The only strength in charity is when it comes from an honest moral fiber, something government is incapable of providing.

Why would the government want to give money? To repudiate past wrongs and try to make amends?

Just because we’re hated in many countries doesn’t mean our government should try to fix things up.

Government is only capable of steadily deteriorating our status quo between elections.

Resolving the issue of hatred toward America is a completely different problem.

After all, most Americans are conceited and this attitude hurts how other countries see America.

America, the nation of hapless, overweight tourists now has the self-perception that it is hated throughout the world. It’s probably true.

Ignorant Americans think their country is the only one in the world without problems. Let the French have their military defeats and laugh at the Germans and how they never got their Reich around to that thousand-year mark.

Washington, D.C. — like Rome, Tenochtitlan and Constantinople — is going to be around forever in the exact same way it exists now. Naturally, this is a foolish assumption.

Enlightened Americans — or Americans who believe they are — believe America is the hated, more so than any country in the history of the world.

We should learn to understand those cultures we offend so we don’t offend them any more.

I think that this is foolish as much as it assumes, but I’m also not saying we’re not hated.

I have no doubt that philandering George McFisk, his trophy wife Nancy, their three adorable puppies and two monthly alimony payments are quite adept representing America in the worst light possible.

Some backward societies in the world must find them pretty offensive, so it’s only right that we cater to them.

Do you think peoples in other countries are trying to better understand us? Not everyone in the world will instantly see past McFisk’s robber baron guffaws, or even try.

Do you think there is a distinctive and widespread effort in the media outlets of countries that hate us to understand the godless American, infidel and heathen?

People in other countries fall for the same tricks we do. Neither they nor we are any smarter now that some of us are enlightened.

For example, everyone mistakes the actions of a government for the actions of its people. If they don’t like our president, they don’t like us. If we don’t like their leader, instantly hold contempt for them as the people, until we catch ourselves reconsidering our prejudice.

The best-case scenario for government charity to other countries is ending poorly, because it essentially amounts to some patriotic guilt.

As America, land of the free and the charitable, we must rise to the moral high ground, because we think we’re already there.

Because there’s the national perception that we perceive ourselves as the wealthiest, happiest nation on earth, we feel a responsibility to be charitable.

This idea of bearing responsibility for other cultures because we’re the best in the world results in nothing but a patronizing racism.

There is a sort of presumption in us to assume that we can tell which countries need a leg up, and only we can give it to them.

How is this different from saying that without us, they would remain insignificant or problematic or poor?

If our government organizes charity, we will be wounding them culturally as we fix them up physically.

That is the meaning our government’s charity holds, not something we want associated with the United States.

It doesn’t matter whether it is the responsibility of an enlightened society to offer another a leg up.

Let society’s — not the government’s — charity finance literacy drives to keep the idea of charity reputable.

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