Oh, that crazy ol' GOP

So despite my wonderful life living in Europe, I have to keep an eye on US politics and such, and some of the things I learn here give me a different perspective on American situations.

For my photojournalism assignment yesterday, I ended up photographing this crazy activist guy and his friends. Activist guy, Brian Haw, has been living across the street from Britain's Parliament for 5 1/2 years, protesting against various wars and such, general crazy activist folderol. And so there I got many an earful about how wrong the war is etc. etc., and they didn't quite understand that I wasn't Danish, just studying in Denmark, so they liked me.

But I digress, and that's not really related, it was just fun, especially when the Heritage Warden came to tell him to bugger off and then they got in a screaming match. Also yesterday, we spent five hours at the Imperial War Museum. Yes, five. It wasn't really what I expected from a war museum; we spent most of our time focusing on the Holocaust and such.

What I took away from it, among some other things, was an important point that British people today like to think they were fighting in WWII to save the Jews, even though during the war they knew about the concentration camps and did nothing to stop them because it would have let the Germans know their code had been broken. And today, the US knows the genocide going on in Darfur and we see a lot of other horrible crimes against humanity, but we don't really do much about them. Even in Iraq, we didn't go in with the aim of helping humanity, we went in under the false pretense that America could have been attacked by Iraq.

Even the GOP says we are fighting an ideology, not a tangible enemy (it's their newest commercial, just click on top news or whatever to see it), yet the armed forces in Iraq are fighting like it's an actual war and not an ideological one. Why, if we are so desperate to show the Muslim extremist world that we really are a good country, do we not act like a good country? Why do we go into a hastily-thrown-together war in Iraq instead of ending a genocide in Sudan? Why do we not put hundreds of billions into improving domestic life for both our country and that in the developing world? It seems so simple to me that if we do not want to be seen as a capitalist, destructive society with no heart, then we should not act like a capitalist, destructive society with no heart.

We should be fighting to save humanity, not fighting to cause more harm to innocent people.

Living in Europe has made me realize how much I love America, really, and how much I love being American, but it also has reinforced my beliefs that this administration (and probably others before it, but I didn't follow politics then) doesn't know what it's doing in the world and doesn't really care about the world's opinion of it. It's a hard thing to do, to see how little my country is valued by the rest of the world, and how much of a joke it is to so many people.