Re: What made America better off as a nation?

At 05:21 AM 09/10/2004 -0400, M. Spence wrote:
>Please keep your anti-Christian, revisionist history rantings off of this
>list, it is not on topic nor particularly insightful. The only thing that
>would have made your screed more cliched would be to toss in the
>Inquisition or Crusades.
>--DAS

 From my point of view, living outside the USA, Ed's quotations made a lot
of sense. For us living outside the USA it has always been a surprise,
that the love for their country closes the eyes of many of USA citizens for
what is wrong in the USA.

The one thing that makes it that way is in my opinion the idea USA citizens
have of "democracy". Their democracy appears for outsiders to be limited
to voting in a president once every four years. In many cases that
president appears to be able to make decisions without the approval of a
great many people in the population. If voting in effect is limited to two
parties there will be a great many people whose voice is not
heard. Growing up in The Netherlands I was used to proportional
representation, so minorities like Christians and Socialists were
represented in parliament. Even if they were not always part of the
"cabinet" which made the final decisions they had a lot of influence by
just stating their position, and in WWII Socialists and Christians could
work together in the so-called "underground" army which was fighting the
German occupation and the Durch government of traitors installed by the
Germans. (I was part of that, and in the view of the USA people we
probably would have been called insurgents.)

So if Ed's voice and similar ones are not heard, the outside world will get
the impression that citizens in the USA are all of one thought. In other
words that the USA has become a country led by dictators.

Jan de Koning
Received on Sat Oct 9 12:08:27 2004