:: Venting Insanity ::

:: Sunday, July 13, 2003 ::

photologs
Salam Pax set up a photolog online. His friend, G., set up his own photolog as well. These have the ability for viewers to leave comments.

Poor G. got inundated with comments. Apparently, people decided to make his a debate forum. While I didn't read much in the way of a debate on Salam's, his buddy got slammed.

As always, I fell for the bait...

my comments
Unable to resist, I left some of my own to fuel the fires of debate...

Wow... when did a photolog become a debate forum?

One thing... why is it when something happens everyone automatically expects the Americans to be the saviors? Yet, nobody likes us anyway. Heck, half our own population doesn't even like us. Frankly, if we're so unappreciated, we should just stay out of everything and let the others handle it.

No foreign aid, no trading, no helping out with earthquake victims, no aid for disease control, no humanitarian missions... Need I go on? Everyone should know that we have enough problems here at home to worry about where that's concerned. We have our own problems with AIDS, Cancer, earthquakes, floods, wildfires, homeless, economy troubles, unemployed, etc. Yet, no one's coming to bail us out. You could have five countries show up in a sixth country after a terrible earthquake, but all the natives stand around and whine like crazy that no one's helping them until the Americans show up. And these same people, after everything's cleaned up and fixed, will run around screaming how they hate us and burn our flag.

But, we still do it, don't we?

Look, we're not perfect. We don't always side with the right people, but we do try to take the best action there is to take at the time. We work on what information we're given. I'm not claiming to have all the facts personally. In fact, I know I don't. The point I'm trying to make is that no one has all the facts. NO ONE.

We all try to do what's best, but we all make mistakes. Americans have the biggest hearts out there, and there's always citizens of our country who are out there trying to help and giving of their time and money to assist people who may be less fortunate than them. Our government is always raising money for foreign aid to all sorts of people.

We try.

We make mistakes.

We're not infallible.

We can only do so many things at once.

I'm sorry if your particular national crisis doesn't happen to be at the top of our list, but did you ever think to ask another country for help, too? Did you ever think that we might be trying somewhere else at the moment and don't want to leave that other job half finished? Are you so narrowminded in your worldview that you think your national problems are the only problems out there?

Please. We try. We're a young country, only 227 years old. We may not always make the right decisions, but no one's perfect.

Not even me... not even you.

You know, and it's true. I don't claim to be perfect. I'm just tired of everyone being angry at me because I'm an American. I'm *MAJORLY* tired of Americans being angry at me because I'm an American and that I'm proud of it. I feel extremely lucky to live where I live. Even with the various problems and my current jobless state in this crappy economy. I'm lucky I live in a country where I have the right to complain about it and exercise my free speech.

I don't know everything, I don't claim to know everything. Heck, I'm probably even on the naive side of things, but I only know as much as people are willing to tell me. I don't have an elite force of intelligence gatherers at my beck and call getting me all sorts of information on every person in every corner of the globe. Frankly, I sincerely doubt any other "normal" person in this world does, either.

For once, I just want to be able to say I'm American and be proud of that fact without hearing how horrible my country is just because someone screwed something up several years ago. And, if we did screw it up, it's not like we don't try to fix it.

for more information
If you curious as to why I posted these comments, please read the comments on Gee's Photolog... most notably, the ones for Saturday, June 28^th.