The other day I was at a restaurant in Waterville Valley NH after a trip skiing, and the dinner conversation dipped political for a moment. A childhood friend of mine expressed a viewpoint that I had not heard or thought about in some time:
“America does everything for the world. We help everyone else out, but the second we call for help the rest of the world goes silent.”
Every American has a little WWII soldier in his heart hoisting up the American flag over Berlin. What happened after WWII, though? We don’t like to think about that part.
I think our sense of the world is naive, and I include myself in that American we. I don’t actually have a single clue what Chinese people or Russian people think about Americans, but I think we are less important, and certainly less lauded, than we desperately want to be. We make up, what, 5% of the global population?
Another friend of mine, Josh Hoffman, gave me a figure once that stunned me:
During the 1850s, around when Americans were gearing up for the Civil War, the Chinese were going through what is known as the Taiping Rebellion. Let’s say half a million people died in the American Civil War. The Taiping Rebellion lasted over a decade and 20 million people died, a figure that Wikipedia likens to the first world war. Those numbers don’t really make sense to us. Think about how impactful the American civil war remains to us even centuries later. We still feel the aftershocks and the resentment. Other countries feel that kind of shit too on scales that we literally cannot imagine. We are so utterly consumed by our own story that we ignore and even reject the histories of other nations.
There is a lot of history out there. A lot of this history is bigger, older, and longer than our own. We should seek to understand this world rather than shred it to bits.