America: Is it really that great?

It's always a strange feeling for me when e-mailing, or instant messaging, with a person from another country, sometimes even half-way around the world with an 18 hour time difference; but this strange feeling isn't due to distances or time difference. This strange feeling is, however, due to when the topic of current events comes up in conversation, and it seems almost inevitable that it does.

There have been a handful of occasions that in beginning correspondence with my international friends, they have asked the obvious question: Where are you from? When I've told them I live in America, 9 out of 10 responses were that they felt sorry for me. But why would they feel sorry for my living in America? The answer to that question, I think, is rather simple.

America, as far as the general public is concerned, has its priorities so messed up that we favor money more than just about everything else. We teach our children to go to school, study hard, and try to get into a decent college so they can begin a great career; we don't teach them to learn for the sake of learning. No longer are we teaching students that age-old adage "Knowledge is power", instead we are teaching them a new one: Schooling is money -- the more you go to school, the more money you will make; the more money you make, the more successful you will be.

This way of thinking, unfortunately, creates and epidemic of apathy -- the more indoctrinated they are into the delusion that money plays part in success, the less they care about their communities and/or humanity in general. Of course, there are a few exceptions to this rule, as there always are. Money, by its nature, isn't a bad thing, nor is it a good thing; it's just neutral, hanging there in the balance, waiting for the mentality of the person to decide its importance, value, etc.

Greed - not just at the national scale, but at the global scale as well - is an epidemic that is growing wildly, and rapidly. I have stated before on a handful of occasions that the only cure for this "greed disease" is education. What I mean by education, however, is not the rigorous rote of schoolchildren; it is not being shown how to solve a problem and memorizing the solution. Genuine education has less to do with memory than it does with thought - critical thinking, to be more specific. Education comes from the rigorous, never-ending cycle of asking questions, finding the answers, and questioning those answers. This process continues until the answer(s) can be verified to be true, and in some cases, continues throughout the lifespan of the individual.

I encourage any of you reading this not to blindly accept what I have said as being true, but question its veracity. Talk to people who live outside of the US, find out what their opinions are, but don't stop at just one, don't stop at five, but continue talking to these people, asking questions, until you can see a better picture of how those people outside of America view this country.

Side-note: I have also been told by more than just a few that America is one of the most arrogant, egotistical nations on this planet, and you know what? From what I see, they're right.