Global Citizenry is a Good Thing

I can already hear the Republican attack machine preparing the ads and the email campaigns with various attempts to portray Obama's assertion of global citizenship as some kind of knife in the back of the good old U.S.A.  To them may I pose the question:  What planet are you a citizen of?  Or to put it in a way you'll understand, when the evil aliens come and place giants saucers over every continent, do you think when you shout out "But we're Americans!" they'll politely retract their zappers and move on?

Thank God we might have a President who actually knows that giving the German chancellor a neck massage at the dais might be a tad inappropriate.  Thank God we might have a president who understands that no country with 3% of the world population has some sort of divine right to 28% of the world's resources. A President who could fill a blank map of the world with all of its countries and only get a few wrong. (Yeah, I'd have a little trouble with Ghana, the Ivory Coast and Guinea myself.)

The reason so many Limbaugh-listening xenophobes love to hate Europe is because, for all their bluster, they feel inadequate in the face of their own ignorance. They either couldn't learn a foreign language or more likely, didn't really try. I've seen them in Europe, (many more never have even gone there, like our dear Cowboy-in-Chief pre-2000)  they usually speak broken English extra loud, and then get offended at the weary impatience with which they are greeted. (Whoopee. Another American who thinks all he needs to speak is money to get slathered with affection by the natives. )

What kills me is that these are the same people who hold immigrants to the United States in contempt for not learning English or speaking it poorly. Immigrants who come here to work, precisely because they aren't doing so well in their own country.  (The Statue of Liberty says "Give me your tired and your poor" -- not "Send me your successful and educated.")    And yet, if Rush went to Mexico, all he could say is  "Tiene Oxycontin?"

Granted, I had the luck to have a foreign mother who raised me fairly bilingually, and I love languages. You didn't have to push me into Spanish, Italian and German classes. I even took some Rumanian and made Brazilian boyriends talk to me in Portuguese. It doesn't make me better than anyone, but it does give me a slighter biggger sense of how other people think around the world, and that's a good thing I would wish on anybody, 

All I ask is that you don't defend your ignorance as some sort of mark of cultural superiority, and that you don't attack Obama's understanding of different languages, cultures and mindsets as some kind of further proof of a lack of patriotism.

What the hell is so terrible, anyway, about a continent where almost everyone has health insurance and speaks at least one other language, usually English? ( Obama didn't even need his speech interpreted.) As for McCain's assertion that he'd like to speak to Germans too, but only as President, OH PLEASE.  He'd go in a flash if he thought 200,000 people would show up to see him.

MCO 2008

P.S. NOTE TO THE HATER WHOSE COMMENTS I'VE BEEN DELETING: Rich, I'm not taking the bait, friend. even though it's a pretty evil thing to predict I'll be back on the meth. All I can figure out is that you are in such pain from your own use, that if I got high again, you would somehow feel a little better because it would constitute proof that no one can really recover, and therefore it's not your fault that you can't.

Well, that's incredibly sad. I'm sorry the addiction has its claws so deep within you, but do you really think it does your spirit any good to keep attacking me?  And I imagine you don't confine your fury to me, that you spread it across the net, but I think whatever relief that somehow gives you can't compare to the damage it does to you by staying in a state of perpetual resentment. Ain't no way God or recovery can work its magic when you're subsisting on that kind of energy. It won't hurt me, but it will kill you.