LaRoacha from US - General Taste for America
Dear Global Community,
I'm posting as a middle aged American. I'm 45 years old and have had the experience of being in a US Marine in my youth and I am now just a simple construction worker. I've been all over the world and I've seen the attitudes of a lot of different cultures and nationalities. In my travels, I noticed that most French people I met had no use for Americans even though we bailed them out of a couple of wars....no biggie....we're used to being crapped on. The surprise I had was that most of the English I met overseas pretty much hated Americans as well. I've never been to England, but I ran into some in Asia and most I ran into were really anti- American, and this was in the cold war Reagan day's....not the "Bush is a dolt" day's..........My heritage is English and I really want to like people from the UK, but I have to admit that I kicked the shit outta one Brit who just twisted me the wrong way in Thailand. I went to Australia and even though there was a anti-nuclear welcoming party to our arrival, most Aussies really seemed to like having us around. I was in Italy, and I gotta say....they were nice and seemed to love us to the extreme. Most liberal people tend to think that everything America does is tied to some grand scheme to somehow mess over some weaker nation, and if that so,sorry. Most citizens of the US just want to freaking get along, and we don't perceive our leaders as evil people. I think you guy's are just seeing things from a standpoint that you are somehow not the alpha dog, which is really sad actually. Even if your country was in that position, you, as an individual really don't have any more power, it just that you perceive that your standing would be improved as a member of a stronger nation. Really, it's pretty sad...
About the Author:
Name: LaRoacha
Age: 45
Country: US
0 Comments
Published on Wednesday, May 23, 2007 at 7:05 AM.
I'm posting as a middle aged American. I'm 45 years old and have had the experience of being in a US Marine in my youth and I am now just a simple construction worker. I've been all over the world and I've seen the attitudes of a lot of different cultures and nationalities. In my travels, I noticed that most French people I met had no use for Americans even though we bailed them out of a couple of wars....no biggie....we're used to being crapped on. The surprise I had was that most of the English I met overseas pretty much hated Americans as well. I've never been to England, but I ran into some in Asia and most I ran into were really anti- American, and this was in the cold war Reagan day's....not the "Bush is a dolt" day's..........My heritage is English and I really want to like people from the UK, but I have to admit that I kicked the shit outta one Brit who just twisted me the wrong way in Thailand. I went to Australia and even though there was a anti-nuclear welcoming party to our arrival, most Aussies really seemed to like having us around. I was in Italy, and I gotta say....they were nice and seemed to love us to the extreme. Most liberal people tend to think that everything America does is tied to some grand scheme to somehow mess over some weaker nation, and if that so,sorry. Most citizens of the US just want to freaking get along, and we don't perceive our leaders as evil people. I think you guy's are just seeing things from a standpoint that you are somehow not the alpha dog, which is really sad actually. Even if your country was in that position, you, as an individual really don't have any more power, it just that you perceive that your standing would be improved as a member of a stronger nation. Really, it's pretty sad...
About the Author:
Name: LaRoacha
Age: 45
Country: US
Labels: 40's, americans, anti-americanism, foreign policy, north america
Cristobal from Arizona
Dear Global Community,
Where to start...
Americans are complex, passionate, organized, yet troubled individuals, just like everyone else in the world. People seem to hate us, we see Palestinians, for example, burning effigies of Americans in their dusty streets (it seems to be a different group every week, depending on where the president goes and what he says, where he doesn't go...)
People (by people, I mean foreigners) also seem to think they know something about us we, ourselves, don't know....because their news source is The Economist, and our news sources are biased, of course.
The problem might be in our animal nature, in what St. Agustine called the libido dominandi, the will to dominate. Every sentient being, including plants, competes to survive. In order for me to have, I must take. This includes the will to win arguments, to give advice and demand our conversers take it, to be right...or to pretend to be the bigger person by allowing the other person to be right.
If someone has what I want, I might try to take it, and if I lose the challenge and I can't take the thing I want by force or by negotiation, I become resentful.
Envy is another important element in "America hatred"
Competition has always made people hate each other. Or maybe it was the people in power who made the people hate each other in order to make them fight harder against their common enemy. Or in order to make them fight at all. Every nation on earth, by virtue of its existence, is in competition, even if there is no competition. (I mean even if we are dealing with countries on opposite sides of the development line.)
It is easy to turn the "other" into the enemy, for the sake of a common enemy, if for nothing else. This builds camraderie among the citizens....There are many benefits.
I can go on forever. This stuff is too dense to talk about in a single letter. And even if I did talk about everything, I'd still remain an ignorant American who doesn't really know what's going on in the world because I'm too busy ridin' my atv (the foreigners "prawlly" have no idea what the hell that is) and being ensconced in my affluence to see the world as it really is.
Here's another idea. In the states, we only see the more sophisticated foreigners who speak English and have enough money to come here. And since we're students, we are mostly acquainted with those foreigners who decide to go for a degree here. This is like the .0001th percentile. I have Mexican relatives who contemplated how long it would take to get to Spain by bus. This is unfathomable here. There are people in the world who still believe in magic (yes, even in the states) we all know some of the ridiculous things people in the world believe. My point is that we Americans tend to think foreigners are somehow intelligent. Or more intelligent than ourselves. We associate intelligence with Einstein's foreign accent, and since the idiots from the Frankfurt School had the same accent, we thought they, too, were intelligent.
Foreigners came up with such disastrous catastrophes as the Holocaust, Slavery, Imperialism, communism...the US came up with the A-bomb to end all of that non-sense.
Our empire will have been dwarfed by the greatness of the Roman Empire. Let us have our day in the sun. Maybe I should say, We shall have our day in the sun.
"Once more onto the breach dear friends, once more. or close the wall up with our English dead. In peace there is nothing more becomes a man than modest stillness and humility, but when the sounds of war ring in our ears, imitate the action of the Tiger"
-from Shakespeare's Henry V.
About the Author
Name: Cristobal Colon
Age: 26
City: Tempe/Mesa
State: Arizona
Gender: Male
Income: Low
Occupation: Conceptual Artist
0 Comments
Published on Sunday, March 4, 2007 at 7:44 AM.
Where to start...
Americans are complex, passionate, organized, yet troubled individuals, just like everyone else in the world. People seem to hate us, we see Palestinians, for example, burning effigies of Americans in their dusty streets (it seems to be a different group every week, depending on where the president goes and what he says, where he doesn't go...)
People (by people, I mean foreigners) also seem to think they know something about us we, ourselves, don't know....because their news source is The Economist, and our news sources are biased, of course.
The problem might be in our animal nature, in what St. Agustine called the libido dominandi, the will to dominate. Every sentient being, including plants, competes to survive. In order for me to have, I must take. This includes the will to win arguments, to give advice and demand our conversers take it, to be right...or to pretend to be the bigger person by allowing the other person to be right.
If someone has what I want, I might try to take it, and if I lose the challenge and I can't take the thing I want by force or by negotiation, I become resentful.
Envy is another important element in "America hatred"
Competition has always made people hate each other. Or maybe it was the people in power who made the people hate each other in order to make them fight harder against their common enemy. Or in order to make them fight at all. Every nation on earth, by virtue of its existence, is in competition, even if there is no competition. (I mean even if we are dealing with countries on opposite sides of the development line.)
It is easy to turn the "other" into the enemy, for the sake of a common enemy, if for nothing else. This builds camraderie among the citizens....There are many benefits.
I can go on forever. This stuff is too dense to talk about in a single letter. And even if I did talk about everything, I'd still remain an ignorant American who doesn't really know what's going on in the world because I'm too busy ridin' my atv (the foreigners "prawlly" have no idea what the hell that is) and being ensconced in my affluence to see the world as it really is.
Here's another idea. In the states, we only see the more sophisticated foreigners who speak English and have enough money to come here. And since we're students, we are mostly acquainted with those foreigners who decide to go for a degree here. This is like the .0001th percentile. I have Mexican relatives who contemplated how long it would take to get to Spain by bus. This is unfathomable here. There are people in the world who still believe in magic (yes, even in the states) we all know some of the ridiculous things people in the world believe. My point is that we Americans tend to think foreigners are somehow intelligent. Or more intelligent than ourselves. We associate intelligence with Einstein's foreign accent, and since the idiots from the Frankfurt School had the same accent, we thought they, too, were intelligent.
Foreigners came up with such disastrous catastrophes as the Holocaust, Slavery, Imperialism, communism...the US came up with the A-bomb to end all of that non-sense.
Our empire will have been dwarfed by the greatness of the Roman Empire. Let us have our day in the sun. Maybe I should say, We shall have our day in the sun.
"Once more onto the breach dear friends, once more. or close the wall up with our English dead. In peace there is nothing more becomes a man than modest stillness and humility, but when the sounds of war ring in our ears, imitate the action of the Tiger"
-from Shakespeare's Henry V.
About the Author
Name: Cristobal Colon
Age: 26
City: Tempe/Mesa
State: Arizona
Gender: Male
Income: Low
Occupation: Conceptual Artist
Labels: american history, americans, anti-americanism, arizona, artist, foreigners, middle east policy
Anja from America
Dear Global Community,
I have your answers : why Americans do nothing about their government:
The reasons why Americans are not doing anything is because they are complacent. They need a real tragedy to directly create change in their lives. They need to be physically hurt or their families before any action will be taken.
To be in-convenienced for a long period of time.
Things first need to become inconvenient, Americans thrive on convenience. If for a longer period of time their personal lives, daily commute to work, gas prices, prices of beef go up and become problematic then they will start being inquisitive and seek guidance.
Until then Americans will do nothing. There is no real risk for them, their lives won't change dramatically, the corporations protect their gas prices making sure that they remain complacent about global warming by making their beloved SUV's still affordable enough to drive around in. SUV's make Americans feel big protected and important and powerful. Also buying American trucks makes them feel patriotic.
Also as long as the oil and corn industry in the US remains strong so will factory farming remain strong and global warming will become worse. Factory farming is subsidized by corn, corn in return is subsidized by the government which in turn is run by the oil corporations of the world.
As long as beef and meat products full of hormones are cheap, Americans have nothing to complain about, and you bet the US government will make sure that their complacent citizens will not know or hear or really care about what is going on in the rest of the world as long as:
Gas prices don't go up too high, beef and meat remains cheap, Walmart remains cheap (Americans don't care that stuff is made in china) as long that it remains affordable and convenient.
Also young people just want to go about their lives, if you want to make Americans care you have to re-instate a draft (not going to happen because the US does not want people to wake up).
That is why nothing is ever going to change this government, because it will make sure that the people of the US can keep living their convenient lives without much change.
People do care but it takes time and effort something most people don't want to invest their spare time into and until their lives are totally impacted and given a detour they will not make an effort, it has to impact them directly.
Generally people who have family members who die of strange diseases eventually set up charities or start creating organizations to help others suffering from what their loved one died from, the same goes for people who start animal shelters and rehab facilities for drug addicts, in one way or another they were personally affected.
We Americans do care but your life is not our life, yes some of us have relatives over there in the military, but they are only over there because they hope to come back alive and get $40,000 in US government grants to maybe be able to go to college and forget about their wasted time in Iraq or where ever they are sent to. Most of the men/woman in the military are just 18, are too lazy to really get a decent job, going to the military forces them to just follow orders and not be in control of their lives, it's again finding a convenient escape to the harder life of writing resumes back home to work at McDonald's or Pizza Hut.
By joining they feel they are doing something patriotic and that they won't be made fun of by their friends and family, because if they do join; their families and friends can't really make fun of them because then they in turn would be unpatriotic. So it's a temporary escape for most of them, it's not serious for them it's a short stop in life for them being in a foreign place. As long as they have a base nearby that are ok.
WE care but we're too lazy to do anything about it, except better our own lives, like the rest of the people in the world.
About the Author
Name: Anja
Age: 34
Gender: Female
Income: High
Occupation: Graduate
1 Comments
Published on Wednesday, February 28, 2007 at 9:49 PM.
I have your answers : why Americans do nothing about their government:
The reasons why Americans are not doing anything is because they are complacent. They need a real tragedy to directly create change in their lives. They need to be physically hurt or their families before any action will be taken.
To be in-convenienced for a long period of time.
Things first need to become inconvenient, Americans thrive on convenience. If for a longer period of time their personal lives, daily commute to work, gas prices, prices of beef go up and become problematic then they will start being inquisitive and seek guidance.
Until then Americans will do nothing. There is no real risk for them, their lives won't change dramatically, the corporations protect their gas prices making sure that they remain complacent about global warming by making their beloved SUV's still affordable enough to drive around in. SUV's make Americans feel big protected and important and powerful. Also buying American trucks makes them feel patriotic.
Also as long as the oil and corn industry in the US remains strong so will factory farming remain strong and global warming will become worse. Factory farming is subsidized by corn, corn in return is subsidized by the government which in turn is run by the oil corporations of the world.
As long as beef and meat products full of hormones are cheap, Americans have nothing to complain about, and you bet the US government will make sure that their complacent citizens will not know or hear or really care about what is going on in the rest of the world as long as:
Gas prices don't go up too high, beef and meat remains cheap, Walmart remains cheap (Americans don't care that stuff is made in china) as long that it remains affordable and convenient.
Also young people just want to go about their lives, if you want to make Americans care you have to re-instate a draft (not going to happen because the US does not want people to wake up).
That is why nothing is ever going to change this government, because it will make sure that the people of the US can keep living their convenient lives without much change.
People do care but it takes time and effort something most people don't want to invest their spare time into and until their lives are totally impacted and given a detour they will not make an effort, it has to impact them directly.
Generally people who have family members who die of strange diseases eventually set up charities or start creating organizations to help others suffering from what their loved one died from, the same goes for people who start animal shelters and rehab facilities for drug addicts, in one way or another they were personally affected.
We Americans do care but your life is not our life, yes some of us have relatives over there in the military, but they are only over there because they hope to come back alive and get $40,000 in US government grants to maybe be able to go to college and forget about their wasted time in Iraq or where ever they are sent to. Most of the men/woman in the military are just 18, are too lazy to really get a decent job, going to the military forces them to just follow orders and not be in control of their lives, it's again finding a convenient escape to the harder life of writing resumes back home to work at McDonald's or Pizza Hut.
By joining they feel they are doing something patriotic and that they won't be made fun of by their friends and family, because if they do join; their families and friends can't really make fun of them because then they in turn would be unpatriotic. So it's a temporary escape for most of them, it's not serious for them it's a short stop in life for them being in a foreign place. As long as they have a base nearby that are ok.
WE care but we're too lazy to do anything about it, except better our own lives, like the rest of the people in the world.
About the Author
Name: Anja
Age: 34
Gender: Female
Income: High
Occupation: Graduate
Labels: 30's, americans, corporations, domestic policy, environment, female, global warming, high income, north america
