American Naïveté 101

After so many postings last week, it seems like I am getting too many readers. It's weekend, time for a political post. At the PRPL this week, it was finally my turn to get my hands on The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. Being more of a skimmer than a reader, I sometimes start books at the end. Draw your own conclusions as to why I am posting these excerpts of what I found in the last chapter entitled 11/9 versus 9/11.

"America's role in the world, from its inception, had been to be the country that looks forward, not back. One of the most dangerous things that has happened to America since 9/11, under the Bush Administration, is that we have gone from exporting hope to exporting fear. We have gone from trying to coax the best out of the world to snarling at it way too often. And when you export fear, you end up importing everyone else's fears. Yes, we need people who can imagine the worst, because the worst did happen on 9/11 and it could happen again. But, as I said, there is a fine line between precaution and paranoia, and at times we have crossed it. Europeans and others often love to make fun of American optimism and naïveté - our crazy notion that every problem has a solution, that tomorrow can be better than yesterday, that the future can always bury the past. But I have always believed that deep down the rest of the world envies that American optimism and naïveté, it needs it. It is one of the things that help keep the world spinning on its axis. If we go dark as a society, if we stop being the world's "dream factory," we will make the world not only a darker place but also a poorer place."

"In societies that have more memories than dreams, too many people are spending too many days looking backward. They see dignity, affirmation, and self-worth not by mining the present but by chewing on the past. And even that is usually not a real past but an imagined and adorned past. Indeed, such societies focus all their imagination on making that imagined past even more beautiful that it ever was, and then they cling to it like a rosary or a strand of worry beads, rather than imagining a better future and acting on that. It is dangerous enough when other countries go down that route; it would be disastrous for America to lose its bearings and move in that direction."

"I believe that history will make very clear that President Bush shamelessly exploited the emotions around 9/11 for political purposes. He used those 9/11 emotions to take a far-right Republican domestic agenda on taxes, the environment, and social issues form 9/10- an agenda for which he had no popular mandate- and drive it into a 9/12 world. In doing so, Mr. Bush not only drove a wedge between Americans and the world, he drove a wedge between America and its own history and identity. his administration transformed the United States into "The United States of Fighting Terrorism." This is the real reason, in my view, that so many people in the world dislike President Bush so intensely. They feel that he has taken away something very dear to them- an America that exports hope, not fear."