Nathan

The Huffington Post The Blog: "What do they think of us? The common people of the world? The anonymous poor, the near-poor, and those of moderate means. The laboring hard grinders who dream of little more than a small, but better, future for their children. In Africa? Across the Middle East? Asia? On the islands of the Pacific and Atlantic? What do they think of us as we consume 40% of the world's energy and account for half of its military expenditures. An America that topples and erects governments, here and there, willy-nilly, with near-oblivious caprice; an America that strides indifferently across the globe with demonstrable disdain for human rights; an America that shoves and bullies and listens only to those it has marginal cause to fear; an America whose public policies and private ventures have contributed, more than those of any other nation, to the destruction of the living earth on which we all must depend to survive as a species?

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Terrorism, put simply, is war, privatized. It is vastly more mobile, and easier to mount and prosecute successfully, than state-mounted war.

We must face the fact that our country has done hurtful things in the world that the vast majority of Americans know little to nothing about. The victims remember, however, even if we cannot.

We are now entering, I fear, Einstein’s doomsday nightmare."

Some things he write of may be extreme, but probably a good exercise for all of us to stop and think how others might view us and how we might be able to do better by them.