"Timpe, Jim" wrote:
> I'm an American and there are times when I would tend to agree with my
> Canadian brethren. The 'low' points in this country's journey tend to
> overshadow, unfortunately, the 'high' points. For every Monika Lewisnski or
> Jeffrey Dahmer, there's a hundred thousand decent, upstanding people that
> are quietly out of sight doing their best with the God-given gifts and
> talents they have.
While a lot does come from the news and the US's foreign policy ("we
have the right to meddle in anyone else's business but don't meddle in
ours") a lot also comes from the Americans that you tend to meet. The
problem is that in most cases, you see the worst and miss out on the
better examples. The main thing here is that there's a subgroup of
people from the US that are incredibly proud of being American and are
convinced that their country is the best in the world. Now, I have no
problem with national pride, and it's common that people think their
country is the best. What this subgroup then does though is make sure
that everyone else knows that they're American and that the US is the
best country in the world (bonus points are apparantly given for doing
so in as loud an obnoxious fashion as possible). I think a lot of this
comes from the US's position as a world power (or world annoyance
depending on your point of view).
When I was in Russia, there was a group of American students on the
floor below us in our dorm. We used to tease them a lot about how they
didn't know anything about Canada. One of them honestly said, "well it
doesn't matter because we can just nuke everyone anyways". And they
weren't joking either.
I'm not saying there aren't arrogant and annoying people from other
countries, it's just that the US's political position seems to really
add fuel to that fire.
--
Andrew "Frugal" Dacey,
frugal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.tildefrugal.net/
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