The United States of America has always been imperfect. In some ways, it was designed that way. Despite the fact that their faces are on money and engraved into the side of a mountain, the "Founding Fathers" were actually humans with all of the flaws and fallacies that accompany the species. Many, if not all of them, knew that too.
At what point in history did America start thinking of itself the "greatest country in the world"?
During a news roundtable on WNPR’s Where We Live, Colin McEnroe questioned the belief in a more hinged version of Will McAvoy’s rant in the premiere of HBO’s "The Newsroom." Here's a sample of what McEnroe said:
I woke up this morning reading all the CIA stuff and thinking, you know, we say America’s the greatest country in the world. I sometimes wonder what that means. We can’t address something as basic as police killing unarmed suspects. We can’t have a reasonable conversation about detention and forced interrogation and really sadomasochistic techniques. We drag our feet about climate change. We’re in this tiny little minority on the death penalty. We’re spying on our own citizens. So we’re the greatest country how? How are we the greatest country?
McEnroe calls it "the American glow." True, there are many ways to determine the greatest country.
Hartford Courant columnist Dan Haar pointed out that the U.S. is definitely “the greatest country simply in the ability to accumulate wealth.” But there are also many areas in which the U.S. is not the greatest.
@wherewelive Traveling the globe is like time travel. There are time I've seen us light years ahead and other time trapped in the Stone Age.
— 𝖌𝖎𝖙𝖆𝖒𝖇𝖆 (@monumentsinking) December 10, 2014
But is it really good enough to just be the best of a bunch? There is an old Army slogan that said "Be All You Can Be." It didn’t say, "Be Better Than the Rest and Settle." Why not set the bar a little higher?
Listen to the full roundtable discussion on WNPR's Where We Live.
