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Public Persona

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When people in China inquire about where I’m from and I answer, heads shake, laughter erupts, and people ask: “what were your people THINKING? “ I’m ashamed because the words, I don’t know, seem so inadequate and small when trying to explain this monstrous mess we are now in.

And you don’t stop even for a second to wonder why people think it’s ok to treat you like this? It’s obviously not everybody who is treated with such casual contempt. Maybe it’s time to take a short break from fretting about the fate of humanity and concentrate on what your public persona is like and why.

3 responses to “Public Persona”

  1. Dreidel Avatar
    Dreidel

    It always amazes me how certain Americans don’t have the brains or the backbone to defend America when they visit foreign countries and encounter criticism.

    Why didn’t this idiot ask the Chinese questioners about their country’s “two-child” policy, which allowed a married couple to have two children, and then if the wife got pregnant a third time she was forced to have an abortion? Why not ask about their justice system that sentences petty thieves to death, and then takes them out into a field and shoots them in the head two weeks later with no appeal? Why not ask about the recent absolute powers recently given to “paramount leader” Xi Jinping, allowing him to become much more of a dictator than trump could ever envision?

    When I was stationed in Europe, several Swedes that I encountered had the nerve to try to berate me because of America’s treatment of the Indians two hundred
    years     earlier. I reminded them that thirty years earlier during Word War II, my country had been liberating the world from fascism, while their country had been licking Hitler’s boots in profitable neutrality.

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    1. Z Avatar
      Z

      Well, there’s lots that the US that I don’t like, but self-righteous types hope to be the first to inform me US ever had any bad policies. They are hoping I will be shocked. I tend to say yes, settler-colonialism does give certain results; slavery is a bad thing and we are steeped in it; etc. This disconcerts them, and I enjoy that.

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      1. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        “They are hoping I will be shocked.”

        I once knew someone from an unnamed English speaking country who had studied political science at Oxford who tried to shock me a time or two with rhetoric about how bad US foreign policy was… I would just say “Oh… it’s much worse than (whatever weak example he just gave)”. He soon quit that game.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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