I shouldn't judge, since most of my daily activities wouldn't exist without America. And it feels wrong to judge what amounts to AN ENTIRE CONTINENT, and I'm very grateful that the nucleus of almost every major social reform that shaped this, quite frankly, enlightened 21st century, was made up of awesome Americans.
But I get the feeling that those awesome Americans aren't really running things there, or at least the public isn't taking its own social advancement to heart. Human rights, civil liberties, equality, protection from segregation and discrimination by race, sexual orientation or faith - these things, I must admit, sound very American to me, yet where will you encounter them sooner? Canada, Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, Iceland, Australia, Denmark, Germany...
Instead, the ones speaking for America uphold that ideal of self-sufficiency, economic opportunism, lack of social and fiscal responsibility, anti-intellectualism and reliance on faith-centred social norms. The ones that want nothing to do with each-other, and even less with foreigners. It's the same mentality that transformed the wonderful concept of free trade into today's desolate cutthroat ultracorporatist economy that puts price tags on lives and rights. And the American people's foreign ambassadors are the tasteless, lying, polarizing, shallow, slanderous, sensationalist and, above all, obnoxiously forceful and untactful American mass media. Exposure, publicity and PR govern both trade, show-business and politics, essentially transforming elections into trivial popularity contests. Profit margins are considered the only signifier of success - people-centred things like education, security, low crime rate, health, standard of living, equal distribution of wealth and the human development index are all secondary. How the hell does that happen?
Of course, I don't buy all of the above, but it's the prevailing image that Americans have created for themselves - an international Justin Bieber; a perfectly likeable lad in any context EXCEPT as an impossible-to-avoid artificially-inflated monument to shallowness and ruthless dehumanizing profiteering. Knowing better, even simply by the US people on this site, this is so far from the truth that I'm still wondering why it's an enduring stereotype. But if it's true, I oppose every aspect of it.
