The traders in the room next to me are tuned in to Fox news for nine straight hours every day. They also fancy themselves sideline commentators, which makes it quite obvious to the casual observer that they are not President Obama’s biggest supporters. One woman actually called him Osama, because she “seriously couldn’t remember his name!” (…sigh for humanity…)This morning, Fox was airing a clip of the president’s most recent speech where he stated (paraphrased from memory) “Americans, no matter how green you say you are, you still are consuming more resources than an average Indian citizen on a daily basis”. To which, one of the traders replied, “I’d like to hear from one of them [Indians] who wouldn’t trade places with one of us in a heartbeat.”
I rolled my eyes and my heart sank, because aside from the fact that he was missing President Obama’s point entirely, which I take to have been a reevaluation of what we truly need to get by in an age of dwindling resources, he was making an arrogant, and too common, assumption that everyone wants to be an American. Still.
I don’t feel the need to overanalyze his statement, and I recognize that we are blessed in many ways to live in this country, but the belief that America is the greatest country in the world is fading like a cut flower sipping at the last drops of water in its vase. And the fact that one of my fellow Americans would dodge the accountability inherent in Obama’s statement and opt for a rebuttal laden with such cocky entitlement is what worries me most about the fate of our nation.
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