Jacob's Soap Box

By Mila

23 March, 2010

I used to be an anti-American liberal. I used to look at the “horrors” of American foreign policy and what I used to call “ignorance” of the average American citizen as the root causes for all the world’s problems.  Even though I didn’t have a remote idea of what its foreign policy entailed, this was my mindset and outlook then. Somehow I knew it was evil. Don’t ask me how though…

In retrospect, I never really considered its foreign policy to be the main problem. In  reality I saw the way the American people were in general as the biggest problem. I viewed Americans as unhappy people who thought they were happy, as people who had very little to no morals and who were misfortunate to have been born in a sort of capsule that prevented them from understanding how things came to be in the world.

I viewed them almost as part of a machine that worked in a very schematic system and as long as the machine was working then they would have no need to be concerned with the affairs of the world. I viewed them as uncultured and as slaves of a materialistic system that eroded humanity and emboldened pride and arrogance.

When the average American used to say “we are the best” it would infuriate me. Now I look back and realize that where I’m from we also used to say, “we are the best”. In short, for me, the United States, whether its people knew it or not, was the cause of all the materialism that lacked any humanity, promoted ignorance, lacked any sort of culture, and was an exporter of immorality throughout the world.

Because of this view, I then began to put blame on the United States for basically anything. Not only did I blame the US for things it didn’t do right, but for things that it didn’t do at all. I went as far as to construct this entire philosophy in my head where the central pillar of evil was the United States.

Furthermore, because I despised the American way of life and the mentality of the American people, I linked the United States with all the problematic regions in the world. So for example, if Africa was poor it was because the United States was stealing its resources and preventing it from developing as it used it as a war field, especially during the cold-war. If Latin America was corrupt, then it was because the United States needed it to be corrupt for its own interest and because it had put puppet governments in order to fight the Soviets during the cold-war. It was because the American elites needed a place to hide their corruptive transactions and so they used Latin America as a playground. And the list goes on and on….

My vision of reality was so twisted that I would somehow find some esoteric and totally unrelated evidence to support my theories and philosophies about how evil the United States was. I looked at everything through the lens of hate. I was conditioned by hate. Hate is an emotion, so I was plainly being emotional and not using a single neuron in my brain or my heart for that matter. In reality, I was simply being hormonal about the United States.

A few years passed since I’ve been living in the United States by the time I arrived at the university. At the university the professors agreed with me and my anti-American views, however when they would teach the history of my own country that faced 56 coup d’état, military dictatorships, hyperinflation, a guerrilla-style warfare, and Soviet puppets as leaders, they would not know minimal facts and would teach a fictional story about it. A story so far from what really happened that it sounded like a fairy tale to me. They taught a story that was fueled with victimhood and resentment and not based on what really happened. Most of my International Relations professors had never been to the country and were just spouting nonsense based on anti-American sentiment.

I was born amid guerrilla warfare. In fact, the guerrilla started the year I was born and continued until I was 8 years old. The dirty war was primarily fought in my city. And north of the city where I lived is where most of the Soviet driven violence via guerrilleros (or red fighters as we called them) occurred.

Honestly, I don’t remember much. I do, however, remember that those who people today refer to as the “disappeared ones” were the Soviet red driven guerrilla fighters that today people feel pity for and regard as victims.

Anyhow, these university professors here in the US were teaching their students how the US helped the military dictatorship in my country of birth kill its own people. But I knew better than these professors. One day I raised my hand and asked the professor of my Problems in US Foreign Policy class to talk about the Soviet driven guerrillas (militias) and the bombings and kidnappings they would do instead of focusing on some fictional story where the US was the aggressor. The professor knew nothing about the Soviet militias, but somehow he knew all about the US’s “help” to the so-called military dictatorship of my country. I was amazed that he knew nothing of the USSR’s involvement, but somehow it was the US’s (Reagan’s) fault.

Well, just six decades prior to the guerrilla, my country was one of the top 10 richest countries in the world. It had and it still has resources to sustain itself, the entire continent of America (South, Central, and North), and all of Africa combined. It has abundant oil, natural gas, and all sorts of minerals. Its agricultural industry is extremely rich and flowing with different resources.

It was once a country with the potential to be a super-power. It was going on the right path. Industries began to develop; infrastructure was being built around the country, its financial system had begun to boom and banks would lend large amounts of money, our monetary value was actually competitive in the world market, and investors from all over the world would come in and do business with us and even establish a branch of their own business in our country.
The country had a lot of potential and it was realizing its potential, however something happened and the country began to decline.

What happened?

What began as an inoffensive campaign strategy of a politician who played the populous game to win mass support with hollow promises to the poor, turned into the rule of an arrogant socialist full of resentment.

Soon after he assumed power changes did begin to take place. The financial system was quickly taken over by a central bank run by the government, property begun to be disappropriated from the “rich” and supposedly given to the poor, however this socialist didn’t give the poor anything. He just stole from the “rich” without any regards for the poor. It was the so-called rich (who were once poor themselves) that gave the poor an opportunity to work, get an education, travel around the country with great transportation and infrastructure so they could themselves become entrepreneurs and small business men and eventually get out of poverty as well, etc. If it wasn’t for the “rich” the poor would not have a chance to get out of poverty.

It was a fomentation of a class warfare that did not exist.

This socialist “leader” was evermore gaining power as industries began to be run by the government and so more labor unions were now part of the government body and the vicious cycle began. Without the capital to produce and severe financial barriers, fees, and taxes by the government for production, caused the producers not to produce as much and so the entire economic engine began to malfunction. Unemployment rate in the double digits was as common as the air we breathed. The ripple effect had begun.

Less production means fewer jobs. Less jobs means less consumers. Less consumers means less economic growth in every aspect. Less economic growth means more dependency. More dependency means more government.

The socialist leader who had assumed power under the banner of change and “healer” of a “great” socio-economic injustice managed to destroy not only the economic system, but the nation as a whole. This is where the ripple effect can be seen not just in the economic sphere.

When the false premise of some social injustice is inculcated into the minds of people then the country’s society becomes extremely divided. As a result of that division, the society becomes weak. As society becomes weak, so do individuals. And in a society where individuals become weak, progress is rare to non-existent. It turns into a society where corruption reigns.

In order to cope, survive, and have a chance in a system that is corrupt, people then become corrupt themselves. Corruption is a primordial side effect of socialism. With corruption comes distrust. With distrust comes the lack of any opportunity for citizens to form a significant political resistance to these destructive, false, and unsustainable socialist agendas. With the lack of an organized group of individuals fighting these socialist agendas, the government begins to take more and more and in less than a generation, the nation can become completely dependent on literally self-righteous corrupt thieves in power. It happens fast, but it could only happen after a society has been brainwashed to think that it’s a society in need of a revolution of some sort. Kind of like a defiance of the status quo. Only in an already sickened with division, hate, and resentment society can this happen successfully.

In the end, nations become so sick and its citizens so deep in a hole in the ground that they don’t know how to get out of it anymore.

The ripple effect of these nefarious agendas is so huge and so cyclical. In other words, it makes a society fall into a vicious cycle that throws it into an endless and hopeless abyss. A society keeps falling and falling until it no longer knows in which direction it must go in order to climb back up.

When I go back to my country I am extremely happy to see family and friends, but I see a huge sign at the airport that says “welcome, just make sure you leave all your hopes behind.”

By knowing this transgression of events that took place in my country I realized that the United States was a place where one could breathe fresh air and not the polluted air of corruption, hopelessness, and surrender.

I began to grow out of the childish phase that the United States was the cause of all the problems in the world. I began to look at the American people, not as a whole, but rather as individuals and that’s when I realized the great values of the American people. I was wrong to look at them collectively. I should have known that it was different here and not look at what Hollywood, the media, the TV, or the politically correct trends told me how the Americans were.

I began to feel a lot of respect and a great love for this country. One of the things that made me realize how ignorant I had been was when one day I watched a program on TV. The program showed scenes of the only war my country fought with a foreign power in modern history. When they showed young men from my country being shot in the battle field I was crushed with anger and felt such a degree of patriotism that I had never felt before. I have never watched that war that had taken place when I was 6 years old until I saw those scenes on TV. Those scenes didn’t just show me that patriotism and a great pride in one’s nation is a healthy thing to have in a world that is increasingly becoming “nationless”, but they also made me understand why the American people felt so patriotic and proud.

What I used to view as arrogance, turned out to be healthy patriotism and a sense of pride in one nation’s deeds. Here I was feeling the same sense of patriotism and pain for my own country while I watched scenes from one small war. The only war my country fought with a foreign power in modern history. I thought to myself, how insensitive and blind I was not to see how the American people had fought in so many wars spilling blood all over the world with cemeteries throughout the world and receiving more body bags than any other nation in the world since its short 200 year-old history.  And to think that I was one of those who viewed the United States as the only evil one who used nuclear bombs, but failed to see how Japan had killed millions of civilians. It was then that I realized how unjust I had been and how unfair the world was and is incrementally becoming towards the United States.

It was the United States that has virtually showed societies that had fallen into that endless abyss where the top of that abyss was so they could climb back up. It was the United States that showed by example that a better system of life could be adopted and individuals could flourish.

What happened yesterday is a huge wound into this nation’s health. It is as if an already weakened nation was given not a cure or even treatment, but rather an injection containing huge amounts of the same virus it had been infected with.

I have no words to describe how betrayed I feel and how hurt I am by the democrat’s insult with this bill. And I see them laughing and smiling full of arrogance that it makes me sick; literally sick. Definitely a sickness they could never cure. I don’t even think those Americans who are still defending this catastrophic monster plan only because it falls under the Obama presidency really know what the consequences of it are.

I just had time to finish reading most of the bill and my jaw dropped to the floor in disbelief. I still can’t comprehend how this could have happened in the United States.

I read the bill and it is worse than the nationalized healthcare system we had in a third-world country.  In fact, it is a lot worse. And to think this is just their first step.

This must be stopped. And I mean by any means necessary. The government has literally turned against its people. What are people supposed to do then?

Anyway, thanks for listening. I’m just in shock that this is happening and here.

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