keninabu!

Americans

Americans are the tourists of the world.

The Economist recently wrote an article about American isolationism (and, as a sidenote, about how Arnold Schwarzenegger threatened to make Warren Buffett, the world's second-richest man and a grandfather, do 500 situps [use the 'Find' option when you are at the page of this link and type 'buffett']), and talks about how American support for isolationism is on the rise. Increasingly, there is support for withdrawal from Iraq and the rest of the world.

The way that most Americans speak of the world, it is a similar tone: we'll just retreat to our boundaries, and let other countries take care of themselves, while we take care of ourselves.

Even Americans who go abroad bring with them their entire load of prejudices and cultural ideas: I had a good friend of mine spend an entire year in England. At the end of it, he told me he missed his US of A, and that Europe felt positively communist to him. While there is an element of truth to what he says, it also betrays the fact that he had spent the entire year looking at everything around him through his own set of goggles, and he hasn't changed or altered that mental paradigm at all.

Worse, there are other Americans who go around the world, telling other countries that they should do what Americans do back home. I've heard a lot of Americans do that, especially when I was in Germany and Europe.

The worst thing, however, is that they couple this ignorance of the world with the feeling that they can 'go home' and leave the rest of the world behind.

It is really appalling, that the citizens of the world's leading nation are essentially tourists.

America is a land of tourists, who want to leave the world and return home.

posted by keninabu @ 1:01 AM