I have never thought so. I was brought up to believe that we – the USA – are not only the most powerful nation on earth, but also the one that takes care of the world. We spent billions in Africa, we ran to the defense of a multitude of peoples who we thought were in need of help. We won World War II, you’re all very welcome.
Every once in a while, however, I lift up the covers on our history. We know how we treated the african slaves and how long it took for us to disband that part of our culture. We were the first nation to simply decide that white is best – it was the Americans that the German nazis copied- eugenics.
And then there is the Native Americans.
I just finished a book called An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (Revisioning American History), by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. In it, the author gives us the history of the US through the eyes of the Native Americans. European settlers didn’t just move in, take over the land and establish primacy. They (we?) set out to completely eliminate the indigenous population. (“The only good indian is a dead indian – thank you General Sheridan”). The author does not shy away from calling it genocide. This treatise destroys a good deal of what we learned in school, and make all of those popular western movies kind of embarassing; you know, the ones where the cowboys and white soldiers are the good guys and the “injuns” are the bad guys?
And now – in this day and age – we think it’s our responsibility to depose other countries’ leaders (Venezuela being the latest). We think it’s within our rights to simply ‘take over’ another country – will we really take over Greenland?
I fear that the undercurrent of ‘might is right’ as espoused by our current leaders represents the thinking of far too many of our citizenry to simply be dismissed as the ravings of a complete asshole.
Maybe Trump and MAGA isn’t the cause of all this. Maybe he is the result of it
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