From: Jasper
Date: 10/3/01
Time: 1:41:30
PM
African-American,
Unlike you, I am not proud to be an American. I'm not even that high on being a North American anymore because the United States and Canada have both dropped the ball again and again when it comes to standing up to our responsibilities and our ideals. I used to think that Canada was our moral superior but I don't think that anymore. We are so much alike that you need a program to tell the difference.
Don't get me wrong. I was once proud to be an American even when people in power who should have known better were debating such issues as "the Negro problem" and the Voting Rights Act of 1962, which wasn't passed until 1964. I wasn't proud of what the US was (a white guy in a white beard and a red, white and blue top hat?). I was proud of what our country strived to be. I was proud to belong to a tradition of struggle for "freedom and justice for all" that used to mean something. It was a real struggle and it looked like we were gaining on it, that we were learning the right lessons from history and applying them the best we could to make us better than we used to be.
When the peace movement won the wars in Indochina, collectively referred to as the Vietnam War, on behalf of some of the worst violators of basic human rights ever to wield power, they started patting themselves on the back for "ending the war." They then put a gag on people like me and gave us the lessons of Vietnam. Those lessons got stuffed in our ears every time some tyrant took it upon himself the kill a few thousand people in the name of justice - or just for the hell of it - to keep us on the sidelines. They tell us that this sort of thing is tolerable as long as it doesn't involve vital American interests.
The "vital American interest doctrine" is something that the left and the right could agree on and have agreed on. This is the formula for peace that worked so well for so long in Indochina, Somalia, Rwanda, Chad, Kuwait, Iraq, Guatemala and the former Yugoslavia. Now that it's starting to work here, in "the land of the free and the home of the brave" -- only now are Americans as a whole so much as giving the importance of fighting for something of long-term, global significance a serous thought. And why? Not for our ideals, not because of our moral responsibility to others and ourselves (remember that thing we used to call duty?). We're doing it because of a vital American interest -- our survival.
Even a cockroach will fight for its survival. That's nothing to be proud of. Unless, of course, your highest ideal is to be just as good as a cockroach. --Jasper