How dare they question us

[xoxoxoBruce]

I don't know, these furriners are getting awfully uppity. How dare they question baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet. I may park the Chevy and go home in a snit.

Ann Jones writes at TomDispatch, being one of six million American living around the world, she gets questions from people everywhere. The most common, even from the most polite, is, "Have Americans gone over the edge? Are you crazy?".

Then recently, I traveled back to the “homeland.” It struck me there that most Americans have no idea just how strange we now seem to much of the world. In my experience, foreign observers are far better informed about us than the average American is about them. This is partly because the “news” in the American media is so parochial and so limited in its views both of how we act and how other countries think -- even countries with which we were recently, are currently, or threaten soon to be at war. America’s belligerence alone, not to mention its financial acrobatics, compels the rest of the world to keep close track of us. Who knows, after all, what conflict the Americans may drag you into next, as target or reluctant ally?

Hmm, looks like it's time to send some of these people some freedom.

Take the questions stumping Europeans in the Obama years (which 1.6 million Americans residing in Europe regularly find thrown our way). At the absolute top of the list: “Why would anyone oppose national health care?” European and other industrialized countries have had some form of national health care since the 1930s or 1940s, Germany since 1880. Some versions, as in France and Great Britain, have devolved into two-tier public and private systems. Yet even the privileged who pay for a faster track would not begrudge their fellow citizens government-funded comprehensive health care. That so many Americans do strikes Europeans as baffling, if not frankly brutal.

Socialist... then she yammers awhile about the good life in Scandinavia, with all the benefits they get...health care, education, unemployment, pensions... Socialist for sure.

Other things I've had to answer for include:

* Why can’t you Americans stop interfering with women’s health care?

* Why can’t you understand science?

* How can you still be so blind to the reality of climate change?

* How can you speak of the rule of law when your presidents break international laws to make war whenever they want?

* How can you hand over the power to blow up the planet to one lone, ordinary man?

* How can you throw away the Geneva Conventions and your principles to advocate torture?

* Why do you Americans like guns so much? Why do you kill each other at such a rate?

To many, the most baffling and important question of all is: Why do you send your military all over the world to stir up more and more trouble for all of us?

See, I told you they're getting uppity, why not ask us if we're wearing clean underwear, or stopped beating our wife.
Some nerve... hmmm... you know a lot of them resemble the pesky Indians we generously gave those reservations to.