WASHINGTON D.C.—Before I wrote this op-ed piece I realized that for those who do not know who I am, you may think that I’m one of those typical American haters from the right or the left who is simply unhappy with whoever is in control of Congress or the White House. For anyone who knows me, they can tell you this is a total mischaracterization of who I am and what I believe. I believe that America is the greatest nation in the history of western civilization, but that it is so crippled with political partisanship that its days of being the world’s only economic and military superpower are almost behind us; but not for the same reasons political partisans give you. It’s not just government spending, socialism or even bigotry. It is because Americans have become a nation of petty, whiners, who forget just 70 years ago many Americans didn’t have running water in their homes or enough food to eat, yet they did not complain or blame politicians, they picked themselves up, dusted themselves off and went to work to make a great nation the greatest in world history.
Part of our problem is the 24-hour news cycle, which has to create and manufacture news to non-thinking people who rarely pick up a book or travel around the world to learn about things for themselves. For instance, when Natalee Holloway went missing in Aruba, Fox News would recite every hour on the hour, “Breaking news in the Natalie Halloway case, tune in at the top of the hour to find out what we know.” People would listen, and they would hear the same thing that they heard 60 minutes earlier, but the story made viewers so upset that many decided to boycott travel to Aruba. Do you know what happened as a result of the Fox News’ boycott? Aruba’s tourism doubled thanks to free advertisement by that news network.
CNN had a similar plan. They had a 24-hour news cycle about the planet in peril. Global warming had caused fires in Southern California, later found out to be the work of an arsonist firefighter, who wanted to be first on the scene. You see, it doesn’t matter whether it’s on the right or the left, it works. Americans have become political robots with no idea what is really happening around them.
When British Prime Minister Gordon Brown tendered his resignation last summer to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the II, humbly giving authority to new prime minister David Cameron, the midterm elections were on and the winner cried before TV cameras decrying the end of America’s greatness as he once knew it—even though his party just took power in Congress. When BP’s oil spill was happening in the Gulf, Glen Beck belittled the president’s 8-year-old daughter, who was quoted as asking her father when the leak would stop. Republicans blamed our president and Democrats, as always, blamed the previous administration. No one called it what is actually was—an accident.
While Iranian students bravely battled against their own ruthless regime for killing an unarmed innocent young woman who dared to protest, they used social media such as Facebook and Twitter to speak truth to power and to get news out of their repressed nation, while in America social media became the newest weapon of mean bullies in schools to torture and harass young students, who normally would have peace when they left school and went home at the end of the day.
When Chilean miners were trapped miles underground for two months, they sang their nation’s Anthem and Elvis Presley songs to keep their spirits up, while in the U.S. Tea Partiers carried signs with monkeys on them, demanding President Obama, who was born in Hawaii, to go back to Kenya.
The Chinese population once in total isolation from the world used their limited access to the Internet to learn about other cultures and how to get their ingenuity and inventions sold around the globe, while Americans used the Internet to call the president a Muslim and create fictitious e-mails that stated the U.S. Supreme Court was looking into where he was born. An extremely brave teenage girl in Afghanistan had her nose and ears cut off by her husband’s family as punishment for asking for a divorce, but Americans are still fighting over gay marriage. A U.S. Army officer pleaded guilty, lost his pension and was dishonorably discharged from the military and given a jail sentence after admitting to being a pawn of the birther movement, when he refused initially to go to Afghanistan as ordered by the Pentagon.
France broke with its over two centuries hatred of Haiti and arrived on its shores soon after the major earthquake to offer humanitarian aid, while the AP files an erroneous story about Sarah Palin going to Haiti with a hairdresser. It was later revealed to be her daughter Bristol fixing her mom’s hair, as we all have done. Eighty percent of the troops say serving alongside gay members is not an issue, but 60 and 70-year-old politicians in Washington D.C. say the military is not ready for this change. These are the same men who fought racial integration of the military in the 1950s, then claimed in the 1990s that women in the Citadel and other once only-male military institutions would destroy the military as well as the nation.
Iceland dealt with months of not being able to fly airplanes due to volcano eruptions, but a well known and respected American economist complained when the TSA recently decided to use new measures to ensure safety for airline passengers, calling it akin to fascism, even though the same Stamford professor claimed nine years earlier that the Bush administration do whatever it had to in order to keep passengers safe. Could all of this just be politics as usual?
Perhaps it’s time to start acting more adult, and change for the new year. Please pray for our troops in harms way, who fight for our rights. God bless America.
