Gee Lolo, I thought we were kissin' Cousins! Instead I discover we are foriegners? LOL!

All joking aside,you are probably right. I don't know ANYONE who reads foreign news sources of books that are set in non western scenarios.

But lets look at it this way: For a thousand years the rest of the known world fought and struggled together, and against each other. They created art, literature, culture, language, religion, architecture, science, and on and on. And then, in a matter of 200 years, a new nation arises, takes the best of the rest of the world, and then turns in to itself as the culmination of ALL of these cultures, proclaiming that they don't need anyone else's contributions. Not only that, but they are also RICHER, and live in a country FAR richer than any other in the developed world.

We in the USA are insulated from much of what the rest of the world has had to endure, and because of that we have developed the opinion that we are somehow God's blessing to the rest of the world and that the world should acknowledge this and thank us.

And you know, in some respect they SHOULD, but because of our national pride and our innate sense that we ARE right, the rest of the world resents us.

Many Americans just do not care, and those that DO care feel as if we should apologize for what we are and that we should voluntarily punish ourselves by making us subject to world opinion, even to the point of giving up some of our natural prosperity.

We have no past, at least not in the sense that Europe has over 1000 years of past, and China has twice that again! All we can see is our present, and the future we think we see has few boundaries.

But isn't that just like adolescents? They don't even stop to think about the future except in positive terms, and they almost NEVER consider someone else's' past as something that can happen to them. In fact, they consider it to be irrelevant!

Yes, we are a nation of teenagers, God help us all!