America has proclaimed for itself a moral and social standard that allows it to police the globe. However, aside from the progress we’ve made, we really have no right to hold ourselves to the bastion of hope that politicians claim we uphold. There are just too many problems here to be able to legitimately make these claims abroad.
Our healthcare system is a joke. We can’t rightfully say that we’ve got it right when a supposed developing country like Cuba and heavily socialistic Norway, both have better healthcare systems than we do. Health insurance companies, some of which let customers die because treatment is too costly, hold our collective well-beings hostage. You don’t need to watch “Sicko” to find out about problems like this, you see it on the news every day. And we think we have the right to tell the rest of the world how to care for their people.
Universal healthcare systems like the ones in Cuba, Great Britain, France, Norway and other countries might cause higher taxes, but if you examine it more closely, it wouldn’t be that much of a change anyway. Health insurance coverage gets better with the more you pay. In the American healthcare system, you’re putting money into a private company that sees you as little more than a walking dollar.
Then, we also are trying to stop conflicts abroad. However, for some reason we can’t take care of our own conflicts first. We have groups trying to incite violence, as in gang violence. We’ve got so many problems going on, in terms of domestic conflict, despite how much we’ve improved over the past years, yet we seem to have the right to tell other countries to shape up? Where’s the sense of that? Sure, we might not always have the same types of conflict as others, such as the mass slaughter in Burma or Darfur, but it is no less volatile or damaging to our country than it is to others. Some people might say that we don’t have civil wars or child soldiers, like in Uganda for example, but here’s a question for you. What do you consider kids that join gangs here at home? The difference between children recruited into an army in a country like Uganda, and kids who join a gang here, is little more than a couple of years.
We’ve also claimed ourselves a pinnacle for education, when our education system is mediocre at best, as compared to the rest of the world. Part of it is that teachers, on all levels, are underpaid. It makes it harder for them to take pride in their valuable work of shaping the minds of the people who are our country’s future. There are also students who don’t care enough, partially because some teachers are burnt out and have stopped caring. If the teachers don’t care, then why should the students? The quality of education you get in school depends on your teachers, so if they aren’t challenging you, your gained knowledge is a crapshoot. You might gain some knowledge accidentally. You might stay the same. Or you might actually lose something.
There are even more problems that we challenge outside the country, in fact too many to list here. Meanwhile, we let them run mostly unchecked here, like with corruption or the economy. On the domestic front, we contradict the standards we try to impose on other countries so often that it is amazing our foreign policies hold any weight whatsoever.