The deal with this country

Judging by the kinds of topics I frequently bring up, one would hastily tend to assume I am this callous shallow person without a modicum of regard for anything truly deep—and you wouldn’t be very far off the mark. But sporadically, I do ponder over non-self-centered substantive issues, and I do form strong opinions on them.

Today just happens to be one of those days. And you, my lovelies, happen to be the lucky audience.

I’ve been in this country, now, for exactly three years. This country, which abundantly touts itself the land of opportunity, the home of the free, the blessed land of milk and bee regurgitated nectar… you know. In these three years, I’ve had ample opportunity to carefully observe these people, their culture, and society as a whole in an attempt to answer everyone’s favourite question—what’s the deal with this country?

The full blown answer to that question is incredibly verbose and tedious, so I’ll highlight the two fundamental problems which are, not surprisingly, inherently connected. For one, society as a whole is incredibly inward looking. And the second, being smart is not deemed cool. That’s it. I’ve ingeniously distilled all of society’s woes down to derivatives of these two, which in turn share a common root.

To delve a bit into the details, I’ll briefly get into each of these issues, starting with the second one because it is easier to understand, even if I can’t condone it—Being smart is not cool, while being dumb is perfectly acceptable. For example, the average parent here would rather their kid hit a home run in a little league game than get an A in a math test. It gets worse. Hitting the home run and failing the test is great, while not hitting the home run (a failure in sport) and topping the class makes you a geek—uncool. I am not saying being good at sports is bad, just that it needs to be instilled in kids that being well(-enough) read and knowledgeable about things going on is ALSO cool, or at least positive.

Somewhat related to this is our first problem—society as a whole is terribly inward looking—as a direct consequence of ignorance, because knowing stuff is uncool. For the most part, the average person doesn’t know or care about anything outside the confines of their daily existence. You might say this is normal and expected. It is, IF all you do is go about living your life in that little confine. That is in no way the way this country goes about its business. As in it is NOT OK if the average person (and the ones they elect to make major decisions) is retarded like so, and the country goes into war (as an example) and what not trying to impose its whim on nations whose culture it doesn’t bother to understand.

So, in effect, rather than care to understand why people in regions of the world hate them, they proceed to (as they always tend to do) declare these people “hate them for no apparent reason”, or better yet “hate their free way of life”.

I have news for you. No one hates your “freedom”. They hate you. They hate you for effecting arbitrary decisions like the setting up of Israel by displacing people from their existing homes in Palestine.

I don’t have a problem with absolute, indiscriminate (ab)use of power in an attempt to impose one’s views on the rest of the community. If the person doing the imposing is intelligent, it is in everyone’s (the common stupid man) interest to follow orders for a global good. What is NOT OK is attempt to impose views, not realize you’re doing it, have people hate you, not realize you’re causing the hate, and then proceed to follow through with other similar policies and wonder why people hate you so much.

That’s just retarded. Read up on some history or something. Then go out and do whatever it is you do with full and extreme force. Again, I have no problem with extreme violence or anything, as long as the violent party is intelligent about it, and know what it is doing, and why.

So the next time you’re about to exclaim “Just what is the fucking deal with this country?”, calm down, and cheerfully mutter (like you mean it) “Geeks are so sexy”. You know you’ve done your good deed for the day as the kiddies proceed to stay informed in an attempt to impress you. The operative words being “stay” and “informed”.

Good job.