Are Americans too self-absorbed to care about tragedies in the rest of the world?
Submitted 149 days ago by texthinker  Favorite
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In case nobody's noticed, we've had a few problems to deal with here. Our bridges are falling down, our out-of-control president is running amok over other nations (and threatening even more), we still have an entire city that's messed up, a huge chunk of our corn crop is under water, the average citizen can barely afford to drive his car to work, wah-wah-wah. We DO pay attention to other countries (albeit some of us more than others, certainly), and we DO worry about the other countries. But we've got our own HUGE mess to deal with, too.
Dammit - one guy invents Superman, America takes him to heart and then suddenly we're supposed to be everything to everyone at every moment. Personally, I'm for isolationism right now so we can get our own shit together. Usually we're messing up the rest of the world because our government doesn't want to deal with the mess we have HERE!
It is amazing people think Americans are too self-absorbed when the monetary value of American's investments in volunteer projects by far exceeds the monetary value of similar time investments by people in any other country in the 34 countries included in the survey. Go figure.
Source: http://www.jhu.edu/~cnp/PDF/table201.pdf
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_eco_aid_don_percap-economic-aid-donor-per-capita
;P(not counting half EU countries which are also above US)
There is strength in numbers. Look at the total dollar amounts and tell me what country is on top. :-)
If twenty Brits donate $1000 each and two hundred Mexicans donate $500 each who would you rather have on your side? The per capita Brit rate is greater but the Mexicans are doing more good. Same logic applies re Americans.
EU as a total has more than US as a total with your logic.
Although i also believe that the rest of the world should learn to stand on it own feet and stop depending on western world.
Got to be honest, if I walked into most random pubs here and asked about anything to do with the rest of the world aside from Iraq, most people wouldn't know or wouldn't care. It's the nature of people to be initially concerned with home first, I don't think it's fair to label Americans as self-absorbed, rather like sillynilly said, they have a few things going on at home already.
Indeed. I'm sure the Sudanese in the Darfur region could have cared less about America's problems following Hurricane Katrina.
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bitch no, you know the U.S. is sending billions of dollars their way...
hell fk'n yeah, but I bet they still could and cared less, and we're the one's that are self-absorbed!!!! NOT!!!
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[3 points] 148 days ago by deleted user ReplyAll Americans?
What i think is ironic is OUR government is always the one taking care of everything and flipp'n the bill too....
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[1 point] 148 days ago by deleted user ReplyBesides the US government, individual Americans donate a lot of time, money and other types of help to very many countries in need all over the world.
That will more than likely decrease as the prices for everything every where are rising. The people can't afford to donate as much as before.
No. Most people do care, it is just too far away and they are so overwhelmed by all the things that are going wrong here. Plus, the pervasive government philosophy of blaming the victim for suffering misfortune has always had strong support from the Puritan/Calvinist types in the general population.