Wonka Redux

Something else occurred to me since writing this last night.

While this culture of victimhood didn't spring to life in the ashes of 9-11, it certainly fell into heavy play at that time. "Why do they hate us?" "For our Freedoms", was the inane rallying cry from Bush & Co.

No. They don't hate us for our freedoms. They may be jealous of them, but as our government chips away at them bit by bit our "freedoms" are less enviable, anyway. They hate us for good reasons, reasons that we can't be bothered to try to understand because we're too blinded by our pitiful victimhood. Reasons that may seem unfair or trivial to us -- but real reasons, nonetheless, and not too petty to want to kill us for.

Maybe if Ward Churchill hadn't been such an inflammatory dunce, he might have gotten this point across more eloquently. But then again, no one wants to listen to this sort of talk -- it's branded as Un-American by the unthinking. I guess it's easy to think you're right if you never question whether or not you are.

It doesn't matter if we agree with the other sides reasons for hating us or wanting to kill us -- what matters is that we at least make the honest attempt to understand them, for only then can we have a dialogue.

I know why they hate us, and I have trouble blaming them or disagreeing. Not because I hate America -- rather the opposite, because I love us enough to want us to be better. They hate us for our arrogance. They hate us for our greed. They hate us for our exportation of smarmy pop culture laden with soft-core sluttiness that offends their religious sensibilities. (True, they're buying it, but they hate us for making it ubiquitous.) They hate us because we use more than our fair share of the world's resources, and cause more than our fair share of the world's pollution, yet refuse to sign the Kyoto Protocol. They hate us because we're hypocrites. They hate us because we lie. They hate us because we exploit. And now, they hate us because we torture.

And while I won't go so far as to say they're wrong, I'm also squeamish about going as far as hatred. A more apt description of how I feel about my countrymen might be a deep-seated disappointment, a sick feeling that we aren't being the best we could be. I'm disappointed in my fellow Americans -- that we so blindly follow without questioning, that we rarely look deeper than the sound bite, that we're being wimps about demanding accountability from our leaders, not to mention the electoral system that is meant to choose those leaders. I'm disappointed that I live in a country that helped invent modern-day democracy, yet holds so many citizens who refuse to participate in it, whether through ignorance, or complacency, or sheer stupidity.

Most of all, I'm disappointed in myself. For you see, I haven't taken to the streets yet, either. What's my excuse?