What Can We Learn From This? -- An Occasional Series

...

Americans, now too fat and lazy to even count their money, rush to an automated service that counts it for them - well, at least it counts 90% of it or so.  The rest it keeps.  Sure, up until now one of the things that was simply understood about money is that having it meant you would, at some point, have to count it.  You cannot buy something if you don't know how much money you have.  But in 2012 America that is simply an unacceptable chore.  It is better to pay someone to count your money, even if when the counting process is complete they don't actually return it all to you.  Hey, that's the free market in action, right?

Think about the context here.  Think about the women who gather firewood in Darfur at the risk of their lives.  Think about the people in Syria or Iran or Palestine, who want some kind of chance to live their lives, raise a family, go to work and offer something to the next generation. Think about the lives we've thoughtlessly and pointlessly ruined in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia.  Think about the people, just now, tonight, aching for a chance at nothing more than a job and a future, a roof, clean water and something that their children might recognize as a better life.  Then look at us.

Bloated, struggling with our excesses, unaware of the world, we rain anonymous death from the skies and threaten to turn entire regions into smoking rubble.  We offer aid, but only if the nations in such desperate need are willing to put OUR interests above their own.  We demand endless, unlimited fealty but reserve the right to walk away at any time, to declare our allies terrorists, to insist that democratic votes go a certain way and UN powers are never exercised.

This is what freedom looks like today.  People, standing in line, to pay a robot to count their money.  All the while with earbuds tightly in place and the world's increasing desperation nothing more than the rustling of a dove's wing.

American Exceptionalism.  Feel it.
...