"The rest of the world is laughing at the U.S.!"... but should we care?

[IndigoErth]

Originally Posted by Coola Yagami

Our country has a million faults. The only way we'll ever change and try to strive to be better as a country is to at least admit we have them.

Which, unfortunately, is somewhat held back by those people who are very touchy about questioning American exceptionalism and suggesting that anything is in any way imperfect and has room for improvement.


Thing is though, maybe American exceptionalism was more of a thing at one time, when we were by far a unique snowflake and kind of our own brand, so to speak, but we were so eager to suggest that the rest of the world should adopt what we were doing -- including good things such as encouraging some parts of the world to adopt democracy -- that we pretty much eradicated our stance as being that unique and a step above most others because we wanted them to be more like us. Comparatively now, yes, there's notably plenty of issues for us to work on and room to grow. But that's a good thing (albeit not the having of issues, just the ability to recognize it), no nation should stagnate and cling to the cruddy stuff forever. If we can't work on that stuff and improve on it then it's going to be us who is falling behind.