Who’s Really Right Here Anyway?

September 25, 2007 by Andy.

Ever since coming back I have had the pleasure of being an American. I see many driven people push themselves to endless feats; I see many people push themselves so hard in fact that all they know is work, what they have to do, work, and tired. This is our America. It is what we know. It is what we live, breath, preach to our children, strive for, embody as our life goal, and most importantly it is what shapes our view of the rest of the world. We as Americans know that this has to be the way that the rest of the world wants to live; they have to want our cars, our health-care, our land, our big houses, our communication, our religion, our freedom, and most of all our money. It just has to be that way. I mean why would anyone not want these things?…Right!?!?

Well…yesterday I had opportunity to see this concept at its finest. The President of Iran came spoke at Colombia University (one of the most prestigious universities in America), and yes it is the same Iran that we know is enriching uranium to try to blow up everyone with weapons of mass destruction. Wait…are they really? When questioned, the Iranian President said something about supplying power to all of its citizens….nah…they want to blow us up; I mean America and only a few other countries are the only ones capable enough of having nuclear power without using it to blow people and places up…right.?.?

I don’t like where this is going…let me start over.

We assume that everyone wants what we have and live our lives. This has led us to the almost unquestioned belief, held by Americans, that we are right. Well here is my question…are we really? What happens when we actually try and see the world through the eyes of someone that is not American, and no the English do not count because they live in almost a parallel universe. What about those people in the Middle East that we KNOW want to kill us all…do they really? Would the average every day person walking down the street in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, or Kuwait really want to kill us? Ask nearly any American and I would almost be willing to bet that there would be some form of answer to the positive, and even I cannot say that this would be a false answer…but why is that? Would these people really be willing to just kill any old American that they met? Do they not need some sort of provocation? Why do they hate freedom so much? Of course they don’t want to kill us, and of course they don’t hate freedom. The answer to all of these questions, at least after i put my limited knowledge and logic to it, kind of made me sit back and wonder…was the President of Iran really the devil and hate monger that we absolutely knew him to be? Maybe, but might he be saying something else that we refuse to hear?…Probably.

One of the foundation shaking questions that I was asked repeatedly on my journey was, “Why does America want to make war?” That is a difficult question to say the least. How do you answer that…what would you say if some person came up to you and asked you with an honest curiosity absent any hostility…what would you say? The easy answers are: (1) we want you to be free, (2) we are fighting terrorism, and (3) we were attacked first and we are just defending our country. In our eyes all of these are the fervent reasons that we continue to be a presence in the Middle East, but wait…have we mistaken our resolve? What does our freedom mean to the people of the Middle East? Does our freedom that entails wal-mart, McDonalds, big corporations, high divorce rates, more police and people in jail (both literally and percentage of population), high rates of debt, and an updated idea of manifest destiny serve as the answer for these people? Does our worry, our angst, our self-hatred, our greed, and callousness act as a means of freeing these people from their intolerable oppression? If the tables were turned and a country were making its presence more than felt here in the US, and through that presence they were telling us that everything we believed was in essence wrong…what would the sentiment be? Would we feel as if we were being invaded by a culture that we really wanted no part of? Is our idea of freedom universal? Should Wal-Mart be the backbone of every economy? The answer does not seem so clear to me.

America is by far and away the most advanced country in the world, but because we are…does that mean that our ways are appropriate for everyone else? Are we an example of someone sitting in a really nice castle, waving our castle flag, screaming about how we have the nicest castle in the kingdom, but no one really ever bothers to look at other castles or venture outside the castle walls? Are we comfortably ignorant? Do we really care? Are we a modern day Roman or Mongolian Empire? Is it possible that maybe another castle has a better bathroom, better designed entry-way, or even a different way of meeting the needs of its residents? Would it be disrespectful to invite another King into our castle, chastise him before he addressed the people, accuse him of wrongly living differently than we do, publicly laugh at him when he responds to questions, and then tell him that he is trying to obliterate us from the face of the planet? To this the Iranian President responded by saying that in Iran if a speaker was invited into the country he would be shown respect by those that invited him; he said that their version of freedom was different than ours; and he said that he had no desire to create nuclear weapons. Instead of asking further about why he believed this, or what they considered freedom to be, the audience and the national media (Anderson Cooper especially) simply told him that he was wrong and that we were right. Are we really? What is the effect of that on a global scale? How does it make America look to invite a foreign leader to our country and the publicly laugh at him? I sincerely would hope that it would make him and his people like us and our leaders more, but I have to cut off my Unicorn-like optimism on this issue, because I know what would happen if the tables were reversed.

Having had the opportunity to sit down with people from Turkey and other countries that predominantly share the beliefs of Iran, I learned several things. They do not want to hurt anyone (including us)…they just don’t want us to kill them; they don’t really want our “free society”; they are not aggressive unless provoked, and what we see as aggressive defense of our country actually has had the opposite effect of the one so desired; they just want to be left alone without western influence; they really don’t even care what we believe; and most importantly, they would leave us alone if we stopped using our military to force freedom on them.

The other day I was watching Saving Private Ryan, arguable one of the best war movies ever to be made, but as I sat there watching the opening scene when the American troops were storming the Beaches of Normandy, I was overcome with absolute shock. For the first time in my life I was actually able to put myself in the shoes of one of those soldiers, whom I have the UTMOST RESPECT FOR. Our soldiers are our protectors, and they deserve all of the support that we as a nation can put behind them, but can you imagine what it would do to the already frail psyche of a person to watch a fellow soldier be blown up? For the life of me, I could not imagine why, such an advanced species would use all its knowledge to create things that would do such harm to others. Why would humanity do that to each other? And then it occurred to me…we have an entire genre devoted to war movies. That in and of itself speaks volumes about American culture. Is that something that would seem appealing to other cultures? Granted none of these are new ideas, but they are my realizations that have occurred from traveling outside the castle walls. Part of living in the moment is appreciating the beauty of all the things that surround you and keeping an open mind to the way others see things, not simply sticking your fingers in your ears and shaking your head vehemently like the four-year-old that refuses to listen because he knows he is right.

America is truly the greatest nation in the world….for you and me. It has the potential to solve nearly any problem without ever firing a single shot. I am happy to wake up every single morning and live the life that I do; however, my life is not right for everyone else. Maybe there are people that do some things better than I do. Maybe there are people that have a better outlook on life than I do. But the worst thing that I could ever do, would be to simply close myself off and say that I do it best and everyone else should live as I do. Open your eyes and see what surrounds you. Open your ears and listen to what others are telling you. Open your heart and embrace the good that presents itself before you. Most importantly, open your mind and think about what life best suits you and those around you. Who is really right here anyway?

Just a thought or two,

Andy Out

P.S. for those of you who are still interested, feel free to continue to give to our charities, for that is one way you can truly help.

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