I Hate America

That's the common theme I've heard since I was a kid. No, no one outright says, "I hate America", but listen to them long enough and you have to wonder what they like about America if America is so wrong.

The laundry list is long. Americans are rude overseas. American foreign policy has screwed up more countries than it's helped. American support of Israel created the Mideast turmoil. American news caters to the lowest common denominator - short blips of what the news people think Americans want to hear because their attention span is much too short to grasp anything more complex. Americans are the biggest global polluters and largest consumers of natural resources. American military is guilty of condoned human rights abuses. Americans still sentence criminals to that barabric practice of the death penalty. Americans can't feed their own poor, but the rich keep getting richer. Americans think their culture is the only one that counts and don't care to respect other cultures.

Americans [fill in the blank here].

For Americans being the rude, bumbling oafs they are, one glaring point stands out: Americans don't go around bashing every little detail of another country's people and culture. (Ok, maybe the French, but France isn't a real country.)

Why do so many people in other countries find it perfectly acceptable to criticize anything American? In fact, without living in this country, isn't it rude for non-Americans to be criticizing every little aspect of American life? For the life of me I can never figure out how a foreigner can say "The average American has no clue or doesn't care or is too uninformed or..." when odds are that foreigner probably has never even talked to an average American.

Yup, never talked to an average American. How do I know that? Simple. The foreigner is always quick to point out how rude and arrogant the average American is. Who makes it a point to talk to rude, arrogant people?

I sure don't, which is why I don't talk to foreigners. Maybe some day they'll learn to respect other cultures, including the American culture.