This post is for my Americans pals. You guys have had a rough ride lately. If you have time, please read this commentary which was written by a well-respected Washington news correspondent from outside of your country. Some outsiders are paying attention.
NEIL MACDONALD:
On American decency
April 16, 2007
There is a man I know here in suburban Washington who is a conservative, which in this country means truly conservative. He is from Wisconsin and attends his church on Sunday and wears his Middle American values like badges on a sash.
He has also benefited richly from the advantages the U.S. offers its well-to-do, and votes Republican.
Nowadays, like many Americans, he regards the war in Iraq as a debacle. But he still argues with his Maryland neighbours against withdrawing American troops precipitously from Iraq, which most Democrats now assume is what the country wants.
If we leave, he says, so many people will die. It's our mess, and our responsibility. He recognizes that American soldiers are dying, but if hundreds of Americans have to die to save hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, well, that's what we have to do, he says, even if Americans aren't welcome there.
In other words, in his view, doing the right thing ought to trump narrowly defined national interest.
Now, it is true that this man bought George W. Bush's case for war four years ago. But now that it's gone bad, he truly does worry about doing the right thing.
Deep down, a great many Americans feel the same way. It can be seen in the polls, although perhaps the sentiment is not phrased as bluntly as my acquaintance puts it.
And whether the rest of the world cares to recognize it or not, Americans often want to do the right thing.
There was no enriching U.S. national interest in leading NATO into Kosovo, against the will of the UN, to save the Muslim minority there from the clutches of Slobodan Milosevic. But the Americans did it anyway.
There was nothing really to be gained by sending troops to Somalia in the 1990s to stop the horrors there. Quite the opposite, in fact. But the U.S. did that, too.
One suspects public opinion here would have pushed troops into Sudan's troubled Darfur region by now, if Iraq was not going so badly.
To be sure, Washington is capable of the same cynical hypocrisy all nations practise to enrich themselves or protect their interests. But it's hard to imagine another country expending so much blood and treasure attempting to do the right thing, even once in awhile.
Here's another impressive thing Americans do: They give to charity. They hand over their cash to help people, pure and simple, and they do it on a scale that shames the rest of the world.
The philanthropy centre at Indiana University reports that, in 2005, American individuals and corporations gave away $260.2 billion, or 2.2 per cent of average household income. That's a significant amount of money, and an increase of six per cent over the previous year.
A breakdown of the figure shows people here gave even more after disasters like Hurricane Katrina or the Asian tsunami.
Why so generous? Certainly the ability to give is part of it. Americans are wealthy. But even in percentage terms, they give away much, much more than people in other rich societies.
The World Bank rated 12 countries for charitable giving in 2005 and found that American individuals gave away 1.7 per cent of the nation's entire economic output, which was more than twice as much as any other nation. Britain and Canada were a distant second at about .73 per cent of GDP. Down at the bottom of the list were the Turks, Germans and French.
Welcome to the neighbourhood
Now, part of that generosity may flow from American religiosity, and the religious duty to give.
By some measures, this is the most religious country in the world, something many people tend to sneer at, especially when the so-called religious right appears to have so much influence over social and foreign policy. And I must admit, I've suppressed shivers of discomfort when American evangelicals have taken my hands and announced that Jesus loves me and they do, too.
But these believers are often also people with a broad streak of civic decency, the sort who get deeply involved in their children's schools (something else Americans excel at), and show up at your door to welcome you to the neighbourhood.
I have lived in several Canadian cities, and overseas, and never have I experienced the sheer openness and sense of community that neighbours here extend to one another.
Americans also work hard. Lucien Bouchard, the former premier of Quebec, was derided in his own province recently for saying it, but Americans work much harder than we Canadians do.
Repeated studies have found that not only do Americans take far fewer annual vacation days (12, as compared to the Canadian average of 20, or the Germans at 27 and the French at 39), they are also the most likely to work more than 40 hours a week.
Americans actually give back millions of vacation days a year.
It's quite the work ethic. Again, you can sneer at it, and many of my European friends do, but the fact is that the America's devotion to hard work is an economic tide that lifts all the world's boats. Besides, why would you criticize a people for rolling up their sleeves and making a better life for themselves?
Though I've never been shy to criticize, I have to say the list of things I admire about Americans has grown since I arrived here four years ago.
They volunteer in greater numbers than any other nationality. Community service is fast becoming a secondary school requisite. And they have created a society where the consumer is king. If you've ever shopped in an American wine store after years of submitting to the faceless government monopolies in Canada, you know that is often a good thing.
This is probably the first country in human history where a homeless person has gone to court against big government and won.
Now, you can argue (and a great many do) that Americans are overly sure of their righteousness and certainly capable of trivializing, if not trampling on, the happiness of others in the headlong pursuit of their own. American society can be more Darwinian than most. But there is certainly a collective decency here.
As China and India rise, and Russia wields its extraordinary resources, one gets the feeling we may be watching the decline of the American empire. Many will cheer that. I find myself wondering whether the next dominant power will feel anything like the same desire to do the right thing.
