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It's all the rage for Americans to claim America is the greatest nation on earth.
We're the best at this, that and everything else!
Hell yeah!
But is it true?
I take a look around and at my fellow Americans and most of what I see is a bunch of ignorant, sheltered, dilettantes with no sense of culture or history who worship a moronic, vacuous, celebrity obsessed pop culture and material possessions.
We have a government run by people taking kickbaks from billion dollar corpartions while they lie, steal and cheat and whose only concern is their own political careers and bank accounts all the while they lecture us on the virtues of their personal public service and how it is rooted in the most purely altruistic concern for the American people.
Almost half the population is obese because we're too busy playing video games, watching mind numbingly stupid reality TV shows and scarfing down Big Macs and Whoppers to actually take responsibility for our own health.
We have roughly half the population that is too damn lazy to get out of bed in the morning to earn a living but yet has no problem acting like parasitic vermin by collecting a check and living off the efforts of others.
To me Ameirca is becoming one giant cesspool.
Am I wrong?
So maybe someone else can enlighten me as to just what it is that makes America or the average American so great?
The biggest problem is that we have let in too many foreigners. A different culture is fine but when it degrades our own it causes problems. That is what we have today. I watched a liberal Micheal Palin do a trip show and when he came back to London he was seeing so many people from India, Africa ect that he said he did not recognize his own home.
It's all the rage for Americans to claim America is the greatest nation on earth.
We're the best at this, that and everything else!
Hell yeah!
But is it true?
I take a look around and at my fellow Americans and most of what I see is a bunch of ignorant, sheltered, dilettantes with no sense of culture or history who worship a moronic, vacuous, celebrity obsessed pop culture and material possessions.
We have a government run by people taking kickbaks from billion dollar corpartions while they lie, steal and cheat and whose only concern is their own political careers and bank accounts all the while they lecture us on the virtues of their personal public service and how it is rooted in the most purely altruistic concern for the American people.
Almost half the population is obese because we're too busy playing video games, watching mind numbingly stupid reality TV shows and scarfing down Big Macs and Whoppers to actually take responsibility for our own health.
We have roughly half the population that is too damn lazy to get out of bed in the morning to earn a living but yet has no problem acting like parasitic vermin by collecting a check and living off the efforts of others.
To me Ameirca is becoming one giant cesspool.
Am I wrong?
So maybe someone else can enlighten me as to just what it is that makes America or the average American so great?
all that you ascribe is what others "are" or "are doing". I know Honey Boo Boo, Whoppers, and gamers exist, but they dont effect my life. If you're gonna worry about stuff, worry about the big stuff.
Check with your local charities or social advocacy groups to see if your voice can lend a hand[so to speak]
To be fair and objective there are much worser places on earth. I'm not saying America is the worst place, not even close.
I just don't get how we can be so arrogant and claim we are so great, especially when many of us making those claims have never seen a single sunrise beyond America's shores.
It seems to me that we have a penchant for wallowing in and celebrating our ignorance and superficilaty.
I don't like it. I don't want to raise my childran that way and it angers me that there are so many cultural influences working aginst me as a parent seeking to make my children just a few more ignorant, self absorbed, superficial materiliastic Americans.
America is a great place. Americans, on the other hand, have taken that greatness for granted. I think there is no question that our culture is in decline and has been since at least the 80s. We had what they called the "Me generation", which woudn't have been so bad except it was followed by the "Me me generation" and now we have the "Me me me generation".
My hope is that it isn't irreversible. I am not one of those people who thinks there will be a new civil war or that America will collapse, but I think we'll either decay into a permanently 2nd world nation similar to how England declined but never fell in the last years of the 1800s, or else we will hit a bottom where people wake up and a revival will happen. I have no idea which, but I am optimistic that the revival will occur - I think the Tea Party was a strong sign. And for all its faults the Occupy Movement also had some hint of that same spirit.
I just don't get how we can be so arrogant and claim we are so great, especially when many of us making those claims have never seen a single sunrise beyond America's shores.
I've always understood the American penchant for ultra-nationalism as a necessary adaptation. As a synthetic nation, particularly after the great wave of eastern and southern European immigration diluted its historically British origins, the U.S. had no choice but to promote chauvinist nationalism as a substitute for ethnic identity or symbolic focus of loyalty.
European nations such as France found their cohesive glue in their shared ethnic identity (even if, as Eugen Weber suggests, that national identity was itself somewhat synthetic and late in developing). Another solution which was quite successful for a long period was a dynasty and the ideal of Christian civilization it stood for, such as in Habsburg Austria-Hungary.
By the time TR began to worry about "hyphenated Americans", neither of those solutions was available for the U.S., so chauvinism had to fill the gap. As it happened, that necessity coincided with a pre-1914 intellectual fad for Spencerian ideas about nation and race, so it fortuitously found the raw material to work with.
Moreover, having largely escaped the destruction wrought by WWI, chauvinist nationalism in America escaped the object lesson taught the Europeans. Since this happened to coincide with the rise of the U.S. to great power status, the ascent seemed to offer justification. Post-1945 imperial rivalry with the Soviet Union turned up the heat in the crucible, leaving us with a hardened nationalism much closer associated with military and imperial greatness than in its first phase.
I've always understood the American penchant for ultra-nationalism as a necessary adaptation. As a synthetic nation, particularly after the great wave of eastern and southern European immigration diluted its historically British origins, the U.S. had no choice but to promote chauvinist nationalism as a substitute for ethnic identity or symbolic focus of loyalty.
European nations such as France found their cohesive glue in their shared ethnic identity (even if, as Eugen Weber suggests, that national identity was itself somewhat synthetic and late in developing). Another solution which was quite successful for a long period was a dynasty and the ideal of Christian civilization it stood for, such as in Habsburg Austria-Hungary.
By the time TR began to worry about "hyphenated Americans", neither of those solutions was available for the U.S., so chauvinism had to fill the gap. As it happened, that necessity coincided with a pre-1914 intellectual fad for Spencerian ideas about nation and race, so it fortuitously found the raw material to work with.
Moreover, having largely escaped the destruction wrought by WWI, chauvinist nationalism in America escaped the object lesson taught the Europeans. Since this happened to coincide with the rise of the U.S. to great power status, the ascent seemed to offer justification. Post-1945 imperial rivalry with the Soviet Union turned up the heat in the crucible, leaving us with a hardened nationalism much closer associated with military and imperial greatness than in its first phase.
Gee, what a surprise. The leftist's interpretation ignores the ideals of freedom and democracy that have animated American thought, politics, and culture since its inception and instead goes for patriotism, but terms that an adoption of "ultra" "chauvinist" nationalism of Nazi-like proportions. And the idea of American exceptionalism being based on America as the only nation founded on the principles of freedom and power residing in the hands of the people rather than the government? Nope, not worth a mention.
Nope, I don't think you are wrong at all for thinking that and to an extent agree with you. I wish people would open up and see that there are other Western Societies and the quality of life in those countries are just as good if I dare not say better than ours.
It irritates me to no end when you find some Americans out there and mention any country and they have all sorts of stupid complaints about it.. more than usually every country is a socialist country (go figure) and we are on our way there.. but yet, those people have never ventured out of the U.S. and are only going off of what their favorite "news" station tells them.
You would have to live in these other countries for some time to get the whole effect. Everyone I know who lived in these "top QOL" countries came back to the US by choice. They are wonderful to visit. They ARE socialist and that's fine for some, not so much for others.
Sure the USA has it's problems but it also has tens of million of really great and wonderful people. My wife and I spent the years from 2005 to 2010 travelling all over the USA. East to West and North to South. WE had no TV and just tuned out from the media and entertainment almost 100%. IN all of those miles and all of those months on the road we did not have one single problem with one single person and believe me we were in many many really bad looking places.
The natural beauty of the country is just overwhelming. The natural resources are huge, the people are,well people, the good, the bad and the ugly, the same as every other place in the world.
I really think that one of the biggest problems in the USA is the media. A never ending tale of woe, murder, mayhem, instability, disaster and other assorted garbage. It's so bad that many Canadians I know who watch American media refuse to step foot in the country because the picture these freakin idiots project of their country is so bleak. I wish that you could watch the Canadian national news on CTV or CBC. It's just so completely opposite to the American news. Every night after watching the National on CBC I usually feel pretty darn good about my country. There is alway a lot of good new to be reported but the US media never heard of anything good at all. I think this negitivity about the country has a far bigger effect than anyone realizes. It creates a great deal of fear in a whole lot of people. I have read studies on the number of Americans who live in constant fear and the numbers are astounding.
People who fear are unstable in all their ways. They fear their government, their "Enemies", their schools, their doctors and on and on it goes.
It never fails to amaze me that the entire media and entertainment industry is hard at work creating excretement and their are tens of millions of people who hunger and thirst for this garbage. They willingly eat up this filth and it warps them.
I have 8 grown kids. I think I was just an average parent but my kids all turned out pretty darn good. I give a lot of credit to the fact that we did not even have a TV for most of those years the kids were growing up. If the kids wanted to know what was going on in the world they could read my daily newspaper, LOL as if!!!!
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