Imagine you are sitting on another planet receiving all
sorts of communication signals from Earth. You get to know this planet almost
like the palm of your hand but something puzzles you about a country called America .
The reason is that surveys conducted worldwide show that
when asked if they are happy, the American people rank themselves among the
happiest in the world. And yet, America
logs more murders and more of the other crimes than anywhere else. It has more
people in jail on a per capita basis than any other country, and has a gap
between rich and poor that ranks among the widest on Earth. What's going on?
Well, it stands to reason that when almost everyone in the
country is regularly affected by an event that renders normal people unhappy,
those who live in America
must be abnormal, or they are unhappy but that the surveys saying they are must
be false. Which is it? You try to resolve the question over a long period of
time with no luck until one day; lady luck comes knocking at your door.
She comes in the form of an article written by Victor Davis
Hanson under the title: “Ukraine
and Our Useless Outrage” and the subtitle: “The history of Obama's
foreign-policy posturing bodes ill for the future of Ukraine .” You received the article
while sitting on your planet out there in deep space because it was published
on February 27, 2014 on National Review Online and captured from the internet.
You read the article and see that Hanson begins it by citing
four incidences that happened in Europe ;
incidences that preceded the bloodiest war on Earth known as World War II. He
then cites four incidences that happened more recently to America but no
war followed. To begin explaining what this is about, he cites a litany of
warnings that the American President, Barack Obama, and his representatives –
most notably John Kerry – have issued to several actors, including the Iranians
with whom America
still has an outstanding issue, and the President of Ukraine that has since been
deposed by his own people.
The point that Hanson makes by citing those incidences is
that the current American President is different from the leaders of Europe who went to war in response to the incidences that
happened under their watch. And he uses this conclusion as a trampoline to jump
into a state of speculation whereby he predicts with bitter sarcasm that:
“Given Kerry's loud global-warming sermonizing and the administration's serial
threats, bad actors abroad probably believe that burning too much coal is more
likely to anger the U.S. than shooting protesters or gassing enemies.”
Hanson builds on that by further speculating that this
President will probably do nothing in the face of what else is going on in the
world, and he cites a few names: Syria ,
Ukraine , Egypt , Libya ,
China , North Korea , Venezuela ,
Afghanistan , Iraq , Russia 's
Putin, the Baltic States, Eastern Europe , Iran , Japan ,
Taiwan , South Korea , Philippines .
He ends the article by saying that the world has become a
scarier place. By this he means to say he would feel less scared if America
started what will amount to World War III in which perhaps as many as a billion
people will die if you take World War II as a measure of what will happen to a
planet that is now more heavily populated and more heavily armed than ever
before.
And this is when you, sitting on your planet out there in
deep space, finally resolve the question as to whether the American people are
happy or unhappy; sane or insane. You resolve that they are happy and they are
sane because America
is not governed by a nut like Victor Davis Hanson.
Yes, many sad things happen in America on a daily basis, and the
people there ought to be unhappy. But when they compare what they have now to
what they could have been served, they feel lucky.