Just like us: US America and its discontents

In a recent conference call with activists worrying about how to stop an attack on Iran, one gentleman suggested that we should circulate pictures of them and their cities, so that people would see that rather than being camel pushers, they are people ‘just like us.’ While I appreciate the concern, and the true desire to help stop any imperial attack on the people of Iran, I was once again baffled by this US American quality of total self-absorption. The world, it seems, begins and ends at the doors of what we choose to call America the beautiful, but which to the rest of the world is the United States of Amnesia, Egotism, Malice, Hypocrisy.

After living in the US of A for more years than I lived in my native land of Cuba, I have grown to expect that when I look at an illustrated dictionary, the map of the USA will greet me when I research hypocrisy. We mean well, but we do badly; we speak about justice, and then have military courts that are a mockery of justice. We talk about free elections, and then allow a court of five to hand electoral results to a chosen man, who clearly did not obtain the most popular votes in a hotly contested election.

With regard to ‘others’ out there, we have a very childish and obsessive ‘me’ versus ‘them’ attitude, one that berates and punishes anyone who does not do our ‘holy’ will, one who does not look ‘like me,’ who may dress differently, who may choose not to shop at Wal-mart or eat at McDonald’s. Our bible is the advertising bible; our idea of free choice is to pick one of the choices handed out by the latest promotional campaign. And we adore kitsch and knick-knacks from all those ‘other’ nations that are ‘not like us.’ While our economic policies have made life miserable for all of ‘them,’ we want their blankets, paintings, musical instruments, and lately, their DNA and indigenous grains, patented by us, and at a cheap price. On their backs rides our comfortable life style.

Is it a wonder ‘they’ hate ‘us’? Our ‘choice’ is their lack of choice; our life style is their lack of a life. And apparently, if they don’t look like us, we might as well not even consider whether they have the right to exist.

We are children of the Monroe doctrine, and no administration has made this clearer than the present one, but it is something all administrations have done in the past, only not so blatantly. We have demanded things of the rest of the world, such as nuclear non-proliferation, that we refuse to give up ourselves. Somehow it is all right that the one nation that has used nuclear weaponry against peoples and nations will dictate to other nations about their uranium supplies. They are ‘not like us.’

And it is this single-minded belief that the ‘us’ is better than the ‘them’ that has the planet in thrall to our avarice, our deliberate destructiveness, our overall hypocrisy. We are America, using as ours the name of continents, so that others on these continents, including Canadians, Mexicans, Brazilians and Bolivians, Cubans and Venezuelans, are left out. Anyone who has not drunk the Kool-Aid and bought the Big Mac is not ‘like us.’ They are not ‘true’ Americans.

When I suggested, with my hat in my hand, that those of us in the peace and social justice moment begin to call ourselves US Americans, and to call the nation US America, there was not even a discussion. Many of the ones who will work in Nicaragua and El Salvador, still see nothing wrong with calling themselves Americans, us against them. The ones who want walls on the border know nothing about the prior borders, the ones we forced on the generous nation of México, for the simple reason that we wanted slaves and they had outlawed slavery, as a civilized nation. The ones who demand ‘tougher’ immigration laws refuse to learn about our status as international pirates, creating ever more dire poverty across the planet, so that people must leave their beautiful lands and families and the ground that sheltered them at birth to become gas jerks or McDonald peons in this ‘great land of ours.’

Pendulums swing, and there is the law of karma, which affects nations as it affects individuals. Ours began with September 11th. Perhaps it began with September 11th because we had, on another September 11th, toppled a constitutionally elected government and instituted a long reign of desperate terror upon another land. Pinochet is dead, and his victims continue to cry for justice, but his victims are our victims, for it was us that interfered in Chile and brought in Pinochet.

Perhaps Iran will be a similar karma come true. We overthrew their constitutional government in 1953 and installed the barbaric Shah, and then proceeded to train the Shah’s paramilitary death squads. Now we are plagued with death squads that were perhaps once trained by our CIA. Sound familiar? Are they not “just like us?”