Quote:
Originally Posted by Deckard
Oh god yeah.
I know to some I might come across as a smug European posting this stuff about America, but trust me I don't do it to elevate my own country's reputation. (We might be less religious, less right-wing, less guided by patriotism - but we're more insular and stupid in all sorts of other ways!)
No I post these things in the spirit of just utter bafflement. How can the richest, the most powerful country on earth have so many people who are unable or unwilling to look into factual information like this? Is it related to being the most capitalist system in the world, a consumer-led culture taken to its inevitable extreme? Too much bread and circuses? Burnout through working long hours? Did the separation of church and state unwittingly make religion more attractive, which fuels much of the doubt? The greater conservatism and unwillingness to relinquish faulty ideas, traditions and myths? The geography?
|
I have my own theory about what it is, and I think it boils down to laziness. Life is relatively easy in the sense that everything we need to live comfortably is very readily available - plenty of food, plenty of water, (seemingly) plenty of energy, plenty of entertainment, and plenty of easy ways to avoid hearing those unpleasant news stories that don't support your own personal world-view (assuming these folks even
have something you could call a "world-view") - so people just breeze through life, not bothering to expend the energy it takes to be aware of what's going on in the world beyond their own little bubbles of existence. So when someone mentions that saying mandatory Christian prayers in public schools is an exclusionary practice towards non-Christians, well who cares about non-Christians? I don't know any of them - this is a Christian country! Even Obama, supposedly the "most liberal President in U.S. history", finishes every speech with "God bless America", injecting at least a Christian reference at the end of virtually every appearance. Being someone who believes that religion has become more destructive than it is constructive in contemporary society, I do find myself feeling slightly troubled by how thoughtlessly accepted these kinds of things are. I could ramble on for a long time about this, but what it comes down to is that we seem to be approaching a cross-roads where we're either going to become so insular in American society that we just implode under the fear-based "leadership" of idiots like Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, regarding intellectualism as a bad thing, going to war with whoever's too "different" from us, and draining the planet of every natural resource, or we're going to take a significant stride towards more intelligent, informed, balanced living, where we embrace global cultures, oppose malicious governments with intelligent strategies, and move towards lifestyles that allow us to live in harmony with our environment. I feel like it's a crap-shoot regarding which way we end up going.