After reading a headline in the Ennis Daily News about North Korea recently testing an atomic bomb underground, it started the cogs in my mind moving as I recall all the countries, governments and radical factions who would love nothing better than to see our country disintegrated by means of a nuclear threat.
Not to discredit the American educational system, but while I was growing up, the farthest students ever made it in the history books was World War II. Every American history class would begin with the pre-Columbus Indians and end with the closing of the Second World War. I don’t ever remember studying the Korean War, Vietnam War or the Cold War. The only memories I have of Desert Storm are from newscasts and those memorable videos of missiles slamming into the heart of structures in the Middle East so wonderfully covered on CNN. It certainly wasn’t discussed in our Social Studies class the next morning.
History teachers never went into depth about the fact that we are the only country ever to use nuclear weapons in battle or that we always stick our noses in other people’s business where, sometimes, it does not belong and is not wanted. This led many youth to believe that everything was wonderful in the world and that nobody hated us. Youth today are sometimes under the same impression. How wrong that line of thinking is.
The list of countries that would like to see the fall of America isn’t endless, but it certainly isn’t short enough for a Post-It note. Currently, people from countries that wouldn’t mind seeing us fail miserably – whether it be our economy, society or military – include North Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, any other Muslim or Communist nation I might be unaware of and the many hundreds of terrorist groups throughout the world. This doesn’t even take into consideration those who proclaim publicly to be allies but not-so-secretly wish for our demise, which most certainly includes China.
I’m not up with politics and world affairs enough to go into great detail about why all of these people wish to see us wiped from the face of the earth, but what I can say from an observer’s point of view is that I don’t ever remember it being like this before. I’m not exactly sure when everyone in the world began to despise us, but it has to have taken place in the last 20 or so years.
Defenders of our country proclaim all of the good deeds America does for those around the world. We always send food and military aid to those in need. However, on the flip side of that there are misdeeds attributed to Americans that can’t be overlooked. For each country we say we are helping, there is another one we are attempting to aid in its overthrow for, our leaders say, the betterment of its people.
I don’t judge what our government does and how it validates all of the acts it allows, but I wonder if our approval rating as a nation is currently at an all-time low because of what we are presently doing throughout the world. Or is it, perhaps, a result of similar decisions made over the past 40-60 years of decisions.
Did the superpower reputation we were so proud of in the 1940s backfire on us? A variety of historians has identified our nation as a present day Roman Empire and just about everyone knows how that ended. The British also had a stranglehold on the world at one time, but it didn’t last.
With so much hatred in the world for the United States it makes me wonder whether it has always been like this and I just missed it, or if this is a recent development. The one thing I am sure of is that Sept. 11 was a wake-up call for history teachers to start teaching their students about the critical viewpoints of other nations toward America.
The days of others looking toward America as the beacon of hope for a happy future seem to be long gone and the next generation needs to be taught about what is in store for them.
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