This latest diatribe posted Sunday conforms to the usual Obama bashing, but not only that.

This website is obsessed with US bashing. What is it about writers and blogs that are anti-American, in the same way there’s a concerted anti-Semitic chorus.

America, I will admit, has trodden on some toes but isn’t the only state to do so, and certainly not the worst.

When are you going to include the other 199 nations, most of which have far worse records of abuse?

How can you defend such single-minded ranting? The ranting I can tolerate, the narrow focus I can’t.

DL ~ Michigan

——— In reply ———–

Hi DL

I’ve noticed that too, which is why your letter is timely and most welcome, as I need to explain this to myself also.

America’s history is the crux of this discussion. In short, in the century before World War 2 the United States was a sleeping but interfering giant. In the 60 years since it has been the predominant force – cultural, military, and financial – on the planet.

My entire life was spent in the glow of American culture and history. It seemed like (for most of us, it was, literally) a paradise state. If one didn’t run foul of the system, the U.S’s was the best lifestyle and the greatest society to ever exist. And history books superficially confirmed the experienced reality.

But as one grows old (and I’m seriously old) dreams held since youth are gradually crushed – a fact of life, maybe a defining characteristic of human intellectual life. As the body decays the dreams and optimism erode. There might be a physiological nexus but that’s another discussion.

And, with age, the more one reads the more disillusioned one becomes, especially when every black and white issue of fact learned in childhood and youth becomes grayer and blurred as each new version of the truth is discovered (the curse of reading and research) – along with inevitable dirty secrets. None of this is helped by a profusion of innuendo and conspiracy that push credulity and analytical skills to the limit.

Versions of events, btw, not from agents trying to malign the homeland, but experts of the homeland in disagreement of facts.

The bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima show this. No one knows ultimately why those cities fried. Even high-ranking insider contemporaries of that era – scientists and politicians – could not and did not really know. [And, as is the nature of ‘knowing,’ we will never know if they knew and chose not to say!']

So, DL, it’s when one realizes that all history – and daily news, a lifetime of it – was, if not incorrect, too clean, too highly polished, with too many omissions, that the rot sets in.

When one grasps, most reluctantly, that all our ‘Western’ wealth and well-being was due to destroying other colonized or coerced nations, a direct interference and theft** to feather our nest at the expense of their peoples, that the perma-rot sets in.

And the guilt. It’s the guilt that saps an entire life’s meaning. The imaginary scenario of a synthetic being discovering their childhood memories were manufactured – well, I know how that feels.

It’s why I write. 

The United States of America is no worse than any of history’s colonial empires. Except, in this modern age of frightening technologies in the hands of its power elite, the US is becoming a most fearful state imaginable.

 

Since the U.S. is the final elephant in the room, the last empire standing, and is taking a decidedly nasty tack in recent decades, with actions increasingly belying words, I consider it the symbolic and appropriate target of SheepOverboard’s ire.

Kind Regards, Editor.

————————————————————

** Refer this article at William Blum’s killinghop.org 

“Since the end of the Second World War, the United States of America has …

1. Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of which were democratically-elected.
2. Attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries.
3. Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
4. Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries. ¹
5. Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.^”

Considering intelligent people are far more capable, why do they tolerate the rest of us? Why haven’t they become so disgusted with the stupidity surrounding them that they organize to lift themselves out of it?

It should take them only a decade to create the most prosperous and smart nation on the planet .. and leave us in their dust. How can it be that the smartest among us haven’t done it yet? Or have they?

It needs a little more than MENSA for them to avoid the catastrophe facing us all.

Julie
Chicago
ID200806