astounding american arrogance

The statistics say it all. The sense of entitlement and the sheer  arrogance they point to,  are just astounding.

The lives of Others just do not matter. They don't have the same value as the  lives of  Americans themselves.

I am not surprised. Not with the media there playing the propaganda game for the Government and its policies.

 By a two-to-one margin (48%-24%) American voters say they think it is illegal for the U.S. government to target its own citizens living abroad with drone attacks, according to a recent national survey of registered voters by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind.  Just 24 percent say it is legal, agreeing with the position taken by the US Attorney and the Obama administration.

“The public clearly makes an assumption very different from that of the Obama administration or Mr. Brennan: the public thinks targeting American citizens abroad is out of bounds,”

However, by a wide six-to-one margin (75%-13%) voters approve of the U.S. military using drones to carry out attacks abroad “on people and other targets deemed a threat to the U.S.” Republicans, men and whites approve more strongly than Democrats, women, and non-whites, but approval is robust in all demographic categories.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33865.htm

The “White Paper” occasionally mentions a third kind of attack, on U.S. “interests.” These remain undefined. But it treats any attack on our “interests” as equivalent to an armed invasion of the nation -- even if those “interests” are on the other side of the globe. In the war story, “the nation” is an expansive concept, indeed. 

Those are the highlights of the war story and the world it creates. The crucial question that the “White Paper” raises is whether this is the world we want to live in. Once we recognize that this world is a product of imagination, born from one story among several that we might have told after 9/11, we also recognize that we are not forced to live in this world. It is a choice.

The ultimate results of this choice are clear enough. There are uncounted numbers of people dead. A few of them are U.S. citizens. Some (we shall never know how many) may actually be planning an attack that might kill people on U.S. soil. And some (more than we would like to imagine, perhaps) are wholly innocent “collateral damage.” Their deaths raise powerful anti-American sentiments and motivate a few among the survivors to become active planners of attack on the U.S.

Growing anti-Americanism reinforces one more inevitable result of the war story: a distant, muffled, yet very real and constant drumbeat of cultural anxiety that has become part of the soundtrack of American life.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/02/07-9

The U.S. is a paranoid culture. The nation has no foreign enemies posing an existential threat, yet it swoons in collective fear and bristles with the apparatus of the national security state.

.The corporate/militarist government of the U.S. is paranoid by nature; therefore, the populace has good reason to be fearful.

As a people, what is our legacy to future generations? Depressing, isn't it? Ecocide. Debt slavery. War without end. A social milieu in which privileged psychopaths not only thrive but decide the fate of the multitudes.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/02/08-2