Reply #18: and another squanderee pipes up [View All]

[iverglas]

It's a complex thing for this time of morning with work to be done, but ...

What was squandered was the opportunity for the US to relate to the rest of the world as people, over and around the governments involved.

In Canada, we did people stuff. Our government allowed US-bound planes to land at our airports, not knowing what allowing them into our airspace might actually mean -- and no one objected. And then people in the neighbourhood of the airports took hundreds of stranded travellers, most of them USAmericans, into their homes. (I called up the local airport to offer, not thinking that of course my particular airport was going to be getting flights diverted from, not to it.) And then we sent firefighters, and sniffer dogs, and coffee and doughnuts or whoever and whatever all it was that got shipped down to NYC. People responded on a person-to-person, people-to-people level, and on a sub-state level through municipalities and volunteer organizations and the like (as was also the case for Katrina, btw).

And in what seems the most trivial way, we were spurned. The fact that the spurning was so petty was what made it not trivial. We didn't get a "thank you" in that big speech of George's a few days later -- even though we had arguably done more, simply by allowing those planes to enter our airspace and head for our cities, without even mentioning all the humanitarian efforts, than any other country or people, at that point.

Then came the not-with-us-against-us bullshit. People of goodwill, friends, can disagree. They can do so because what is in one's interest is not in the other's equally impotant and legitimate interest, or because one party sees other interests that trump both (like maybe the interests of the people of Afghanistan ... although, oops, we did go along on that adventure), and also because they don't agree on what is in the other's interest: we don't actually think it was in the US's interests, or at least the interests of the USAmerican people, to invade and occupy Iraq. But we were treated the way the right wing in the US treats its own dissenters: we were not treated like partners and allies and friends with whom it was worth consulting and exchanging views, and who were deserving of consideration; we were vilified and insulted.

The opportunity that was there was the chance to reach people around the world on a human level: the event in Iran mentioned in this thread was one manifestation. A huge "thank you" card signed by everybody in the US -- with the president's name at the top of the list -- would have been the appropriate response to that one. If one party could set aside its abhorrence of the other party qua state or government for the occasion, the other party should have held that door open for even just a moment.

The door got shut, on all of us. We had responded as human beings, and what we got in return was an undifferentiated, unnuanced, state-to-state door slam. And escalation of all the crap that makes us hate the US as a state to start with.

People in the US are fond of the idea that we foreigners don't hate them, we hate their government. Well, it gets damned bloody hard to hold that idea when your government, the one you elect, you'll recall, does so much that is so worthy of hating and rejects every effort we make to do what people who like other people as people do.

The opportunity that was squandered wasn't an opportunity for the US to buttress its fortifications by co-opting the rest of us into its vile crusade against half of the world outside its borders. We weren't about to sign on to that. What it was, was an opportunity to spread the kind of goodwill for the people of the US, at a grassroots level out here in the world, that any nation needs to have in its back pocket.

---> The corollary, and it's a rather important one, is that the brief surge of the goodwill felt by USAmericans toward us out here was also choked off. And we can tell you that being left with nothing but the ill will displayed by your government and fostered by the likes of FoxNews doesn't exactly enhance feelings of security, and nourish goodwill in return.

I have to say that your words display an enormously short-sighted, ethnocentric perspective on the whole thing. What's in it for you, eh? "As soon as we started acting ..." -- there the rest of us recalcitrant, dimwitted, cowardly fairweather friends were, not falling into line behind you. Us against them is what it comes down to every time, them being anyone who doesn't do what we're told. And that's exactly what squandered the goodwill.