Kat, John....
I think we need to discuss terms a little bit, y'all. John, you are
offering a pretty good argument about why Americans can be proud of their
country. Kat is offering a pretty good argument about why Americans
should not be arrogant. Pride and arrogance are two different things.
John, to argue that Amercians can justly be arrogant is to argue that I,
simply for being born in America, ought to feel justified going to Russia
and saying to any random Russian, "Hey! I'm better than you 'cause I'm an
American!" That's what the word "arrogance" means. I'm pretty sure
that's not the attitude you want to defend, though.
I like WWII for an example. Americans should justly feel proud of how
America helped win the war. On the other hand, Americans should also
remember that we had to be dragged into the war effort kicking and
screaming all the way. The aid the US sent to Britain during the
Battle of Britain was mostly covert--Roosevelt had to hide a lot of that
effort from Congress because the national mood was emphatically against
ever getting involved in another European war. So I think we should be
wary about taking excessive pride in our decision to send that aid. It's
kind of like the bat-boy trying to take credit for Mark McGwire's home run
record.
Instead we should give rights of arrogance to Britain, for having the
stones to stand up to Hitler for so long with so little help from us or
anybody else. IIRC, as the Battle of Britain went on, the US and Canada
were negotiating with Churchill over how to divide up the British navy
between them on the assumption that Britain must inevitably fall.
Marvin Long
Austin, Texas
