rat

I think fundamentally, that most Americans of a conservative or moderate bent feel that people's lives are in their own hands, to make what they will of them. We also have old feelings of isolationism intrinsic in our teachings throughout our public schooling. When you look to our history lessons, the birth of our nation, our nation's participation in several wars that we let ourselves get drawn into out of greed, there's a sense of "never again."** We're a people who don't like having our emotions, our generosity, our care betrayed. There's a lingering sentiment (though only partially true) that we've bailed too many people out of too many situations since the turn of the 20th century.

At the same time, there's a large portion of the population here that complains about the excess of our government, its spending habits, and our lack of control over where the majority of our tax money is spent. Especially in the last five years, we've seen an overwhelming shift towards an administration that uses foreign aid as a carrot on a stick to let the administration do what it wants in other areas of foreign policy that are detrimental to our fellow men and women of the world. Bush's State of the Union for 03 or 04 talked about 400 billion USD to Africa for AIDS...meanwhile we were waging two separate wars against nations due to the acts of individuals...

Lastly, we're a nation that idealizes the rugged individual who makes its own way in the world, the way our Founders as well as our nation as a whole has done for over two centuries. As thirteen individual colonies, we dared to take the greatest power in the contemporary world into a feat of arms. Why should other nations not dare to be great on their own merits? We have no old colonial loyalties to these nations, we never owned any part of the world (though we did run a few parts, namely South America, over the years), so there's no sense of obligation to make up for past wrongs committed by our nation...

**An aside, my city of Houston, TX is garnering this mentality due to the drastic rise in violent crime and thefts/robberies/burglaries throughout our city since we've taken in the evacuees from New Orleans and the surrounding areas after Hurricane Katrina. The crime rate had been steadily dropping since before 2000, and it has risen over 10% in the last 6 months compared to last year. People who have sheltered those who lost everything have been murdered for money, cars, and valuables by those same evacuees taken in.

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