When I was in college I wrote a paper for some class where I used the technique of anthropomorphism. I argued against foreign aid by setting up the United States and the foreign aid recipient country as if the USA were the parent and the recipient country the child. I had just completed a psych course and this Social Studies course seemed the ideal guinea pig for my sophomoric theories. Well, I posed all of the good parenting skills that we had just learned and tried to answer the seemingly never answered question, “Why, oh why, do they hate us?”. I said that when we treat these countries like idiot children without the skills and abilities to care for themselves, when we mindlessly shower gifts upon them that are useless, unearned and truly undeserved, when we patronize them and pat them on the heads and then say go away and let the grown ups talk…..sure, they hate us and then show their contempt by accepting any and every good thing we give them and rub our noses in whatever the gifts should have been by breaking them throwing them away etc etc. Well, we had just learned that spoiling the child thing and the lack of respect the child develops for the parent. I was told that I was foolishly simplistic. The complexities of foreign diplomacy could not be reduced to simple one on one human interaction. “Why?” I asked. “It seems to me that everything has to be reduced to that since the whole process boils down to one person interacting with another.” “Run along and grow up " I was told.
I wrote that quite some time ago....things have not changed have they? I wrote that paper in 1962. More than 40 years later the elitists are still trying to complicate the simplest of things aren't they? Maybe I just haven't grown up yet. In my opinion this concept can be brought in to our domestic policy of welfare...can it not?
No comments:
Post a Comment