July 4th is the best day of the year for food, friends, fireworks, and – er – fpatriotism. However, for some, there is no room for love of country in their hearts. They may even want to pollute your red, white, and blue-wearing good times with their attitude! Well, don’t worry, I’m here to help you handle this.
Some people refuse to accept American exceptionalism, either because they’ve been lied to, they don’t tend to look at the bigger picture, or attacking America is part of their business model – which is the case with, for example, our previous President who made a habit out of belittling the people he was supposed to be leading.
Here are 10 quick responses to some of the typical America-hating comments you may hear this day.
- Columbus was just a racist murderer!
“Well, like every winner in history, Columbus was a conqueror. Until very, very recently, all civilizations were built and protected by conquest. Not a lot of countries were started with bake sales.” (I wrote a whole piece on this last year here.)
- America has a horrible legacy of slavery!
“Yes, of course it does – but do you know what other countries have a legacy of slavery? Every other one on Earth. The thing that ended slavery was the Industrial Revolution, which made machines that could do the work otherwise performed by slaves. And do you know what made the Industrial Revolution happen? America.”
- America is awful because of what it did to the Native Americans!
“Every empire on Earth absorbed weaker groups into their populations as slaves. In expanding across the continent, Americans actuallychanged this trend by displacing native people’s rather than enslaving them. (The way, say, the Romans absorbed the Etruscans, who now no longer exist.) If Americans hadn’t been so merciful, these native civilizations would have completely died out.”
- Well, America still has a horrible problem with racism today!
“Sure it does, but – again – do you know what other countries have problems with racism? Every single one. America is actually the leastracist country on Earth. We’re the ones who invented not being racist. Problems with race just tend to pop up more here because we’re much more culturally diverse than most countries, which – again – is why we invented not being racist.”
- I’m going to make sure everyone knows how awful America is on my social media!
“Hey, do you know who invented social media? That would, again, be America.”
I mean there’s more, but you get the idea; yes obviously America isn’t perfect, but honey, the universe isn’t perfect. America has done an amazing job making the universe better, with technological, economic, and cultural advances that happened here. Indeed, you could say we’ve formed a …more perfect union than exists elsewhere.
Uh. Except fireworks were invented by the Chinese. So. Thank you, our Chinese friends.
