Adam's Apple
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- Apr 25, 2004
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Opportunity Knocks for the Knockers
By Wesley Pruden, The Washington Times
September 9, 2005
Some of our fast friends in the rest of the world who thought they understood us have decided that maybe they don't.
"We have been puzzled by the pictures on television," a friendly Indonesian diplomat says. "We were plucking starving, bedraggled people out of trees more than a week after the tsunami, and the reaction was invariably one of gratitude and thanksgiving. In America there is only complaining that someone did not get there sooner with more."
Unless we're all jerks, we all stand humiliated for what the televised acts of a miserable few over the past fortnight have told the world about us, portraying us as a nation of whining, churlish ingrates and opportunists, or worse, eager to exploit the suffering of others.
The newspapers frame the television images as the lasting public perceptions. "Anarchy in the USA," screams the headline in Britain's best-selling newspaper, the Sun. "Apocalypse Now," cries Berlin's Handelsblatt. A Portuguese cameraman tells Lisbon television: "It's a chaotic situation. It's terrible. It's a situation we generally see in the Third World." In fact, residents of the Third World, from South America across Africa to Asia, have the right to feel insulted by odious comparison. "I am absolutely disgusted," a Sri Lankan businessman says of the thieves, murderers and rapists who turned New Orleans into a killing field. "Not a single tourist caught in the Asian tsunami was mugged. Now with all this happening in America, we can easily see where the civilized part of the world lies."
But as appalling as the behavior of the churlish, the thuggish and the barbaric has been, the behavior of our politicians is worse. The politicians, who have the excuse of neither poverty nor ignorance, deliberately exploit the misery of others for personal gain. The early rebukes of the mayor, the governor and the president got things moving, but with that accomplished, you might think that for once we're neither black nor white, liberal nor conservative, Republican nor Democrat, but Americans eager to help other Americans.
for full article: http://www.washtimes.com/national/pruden.htm
By Wesley Pruden, The Washington Times
September 9, 2005
Some of our fast friends in the rest of the world who thought they understood us have decided that maybe they don't.
"We have been puzzled by the pictures on television," a friendly Indonesian diplomat says. "We were plucking starving, bedraggled people out of trees more than a week after the tsunami, and the reaction was invariably one of gratitude and thanksgiving. In America there is only complaining that someone did not get there sooner with more."
Unless we're all jerks, we all stand humiliated for what the televised acts of a miserable few over the past fortnight have told the world about us, portraying us as a nation of whining, churlish ingrates and opportunists, or worse, eager to exploit the suffering of others.
The newspapers frame the television images as the lasting public perceptions. "Anarchy in the USA," screams the headline in Britain's best-selling newspaper, the Sun. "Apocalypse Now," cries Berlin's Handelsblatt. A Portuguese cameraman tells Lisbon television: "It's a chaotic situation. It's terrible. It's a situation we generally see in the Third World." In fact, residents of the Third World, from South America across Africa to Asia, have the right to feel insulted by odious comparison. "I am absolutely disgusted," a Sri Lankan businessman says of the thieves, murderers and rapists who turned New Orleans into a killing field. "Not a single tourist caught in the Asian tsunami was mugged. Now with all this happening in America, we can easily see where the civilized part of the world lies."
But as appalling as the behavior of the churlish, the thuggish and the barbaric has been, the behavior of our politicians is worse. The politicians, who have the excuse of neither poverty nor ignorance, deliberately exploit the misery of others for personal gain. The early rebukes of the mayor, the governor and the president got things moving, but with that accomplished, you might think that for once we're neither black nor white, liberal nor conservative, Republican nor Democrat, but Americans eager to help other Americans.
for full article: http://www.washtimes.com/national/pruden.htm
