I talked to a girl today who is from America, (up-state NY to be precise) and she is a staunch anti-Americana. She bases her hatred of America on the fact that she had a hard time getting into collage because she divorced her mother and her father so received no financial help from them. The federal government does not care about this because she is not an emancipated minor (she says that NY is the only state where there is no such thing) so she could not get financial aid because her mother has a half million dollar trust fund which she cannot get into till she is 55.
I can understand angst and even being pissed off at the government over this. When I said something about trying to talk to the education department about a workaround for this she said that there was not one. I asked how she was sure, she said her grandfather worked for the justice department as a judge and that he had looked into it for her. (so if he is a FEDERAL JUDGE maybe she should ask him for financial help?????)
Anyway the hypocrisy came as my friend Oliver, who is Croatian living in England on a refugees visa he got during the civil war (during which time he spent 3 whole months in a make shift bomb shelter with his family and did not see the sky for the whole time!), asked her about life in America and why she wanted to leave it so badly. She said it was because in western Europe the people had more freedoms than in the USA. (?) And she said that the government of the US was just bad, that the US was no longer “the land of the free.” She said that the US had failed to live up to it’s ideal (OK, get ready here it comes…) As an example of this she cited the restrictions and virtual ban on Jewish immigration in the years leading up to the second world war.
OK, so I said that this was not a strictly US problem, that many nations had harsh restrictions on Jews before WWII, much of the world was anti-Semitic. Then remembering something she had said earlier in another conversation I asked her what kind of car she drove before she came to England. A Ford Torus she said. So I asked her why she drove a Torus. Looking at me with a questioning expression she said because she liked Fords so she got it over the other used cars in her price range at the time. (My turn, my turn!) OK I said, so you have finished the classes for a minor in history focusing on WWII, right? (she mentioned this earlier too To which she said yes. So I said; OK, you have used something America did before WWII as a justification for hating it. But you drive a Torus, a car built by a company founded by the only American mentioned by name in Mien Kompfe. Mentioned because of a paper he wrote about the threat to the world that the “international Jew” posed. A man who funneled more lobbying money into anti-Semitic legislation than anyone else. How can you justify that?
She did not even try, she soon left.
I hate people who pretend to have a moral or ethical problem with something but cannot seam to practice what they spout off about. If she is going to hold a grudge against America for it’s anti-Semitics but drive a car produced by the guy who lobbied for those laws is that not hypocritical?
It’s not easy to stand up and practice your ethics/morals, I don’t know anyone who can do it 100% of the time, most of us can manage to try thought. I have a moral issue with China, so I go out of my way to try to avoid products produces in China, which is not always passable. For example, my laptop on which I am typing this contains many parts made in China, but it contains less than several other laptops I looked at. It is depressing to see how many people find one thing wrong with something and complain about it, but don’t try to do anything about it; instead of going to college, getting a degree and trying to change the system (either the financial aid, or the problems with America) this girl had decided to do a degree in engineering because that field paid well and she hoped to get a job in some other country. She decided to escape rather than fact the problems and try to fix them.
