If We're So Great, Why?

 

If We’re So Great, Why?

July 7, 2023

 

So we’ve just passed another July 4, America’s national holiday. Of course there was all of the usual Fourth of July stuff, fireworks mostly, but also a great deal of proclaiming that this is the best country in the world. All of it reminded me of an incident that took place in 1969 in Stuttgart, Germany. I was part of a new student exchange program between three Oregon universities and the University of Stuttgart. I lived in a foreign students dorm. For a time one of my roommates was from Columbia. He didn’t speak English, and I don’t speak Spanish; but we communicated quite well in German. One day he introduced me to a friend of his from Peru. Of course, they both spoke Spanish as their native language, but the common language the three of us had was German. My roommate introduced me as his roommate, then he said: “Er ist Amerikaner, hat sich aber entschuldigt”—He is an American, but he’s apologized.”

I had never actually apologized for being American, but I think one young man from South America introducing an American to another young man from South America that way says something very important about the United States of America, and I don’t think what it says has changed much in the many years since 1969. Why would these young men think being an American was something for which one had to apologize? The only conceivable reason is that from their perspective the United States of America was not something for anyone to be proud of. Quite the contrary. You apologize for making a mistake. You apologize for having done something wrong. These two young men clearly thought the United States had done enough wrong that I, as an American, really should apologize for it.

It's not hard to understand why people from South America (or several other parts of the world for that matter) would think about our country that way. Our history of actions in South America is indeed shameful. Mostly what we’ve done there is exploit the people and the land for our own economic benefit. To secure that economic benefit we have supported ruthless, dictatorial rulers in many different countries. Our interest in that part of the world has never been the welfare of the people who live there. Rather, we have acted to perpetuate dictatorship and poverty because large American corporations made more money when we did than they otherwise would have made.

Is that the way a nation that truly was the greatest nation on earth would act? Of course not. A great nation, especially a rich one like us, would use its resources to promote freedom and economic wellbeing in every other country in the world. We might say that’s what we do, but when we do we lie. That is not what we have done anywhere in the world perhaps since the Marshall Plan of the late 1940s. And we even did that one out of self-interest as a way of stopping Communism in western Europe. No, we have rarely if ever acted like the greatest country in the world in our relations with other nations. We haven’t done that internally either. If we’re the greatest country in the world, why do people around the world think being American is something for which one must apologize? Because we have always acted in the past and act in the present in our own (usually short-sighted) self-interest, the people of other countries be damned. That’s why.

So go ahead and terrify animals and people with PTSD with your fireworks every July 4. Most Americans think that’s fun, I guess. Every nation has its national day, and I suppose we’re entitled to ours too. My wife, our dog, and I flee to Canada every year to get away from it, but that’s us. (We’re lucky to live just a couple of hours south of the US-Canada border.) It doesn’t have to be you. I ask just one thing. Please give up the nonsensical notion that we are the greatest country in the world. There are so very many ways in which we just flat aren’t. We have an immense number of things for which we do indeed need to apologize, exploitation of foreign people being just one of them. The greatest nation in the world? No. Not even close.