While having morning coffee in a SLO restaurant, I read Glen Starkey’s “We’re so great!” column (June 23) which showed the height of elitism with the preamble to his article on Fourth of July arts events. He insults our country on this Independence Day with American hatred, much like Reverend Wright’s “God damn America.” He bloviates with a litany of our country’s perceived shortcomings: Its corrupt wars, its high gas prices, its attempts to legitimize torture, its pathetic health-care system, its racism, and on and on. He must be suffering so much by gas shortages for his SUV, police brutality keeping him from work, and lack of public services that he has to carry his own water; he just had to lash out.
He must talk like this with his colleagues in a SLO coffee house each morning, denigrating the United States with its abundance, its opportunity for everyone, and its jobs even for snotty little newspaper columnists. The USA is no utopia; but find any place where the individual has as much opportunity or as high a standard of living as we do. People are clamoring to have just a piece of what we have here in the United States.
Celebrate Independence Day and just think, for once in your life, what our forefathers sacrificed to create this greatest nation on earth. Read Dinesh D’Sousa’s What’s So Great about America? You’ll find out.
This article appears in Jul 10-17, 2008.