I am beginning to have less and less patience with people who want to lay the troubles of the world at the feet of someone else. It's all George Bush's fault; it's all the fault of Muslims; it's all the rich people's fault; or those bums on welfare are to blame. Sure, some of these individuals or groups who we point fingers of accusation at have things to answer for, but how long can we continue to use them as an excuse for our own inaction in the areas that we can control?
How many times have you heard people complain about the homogenization of the world? Everywhere you look there's a MacDonald's Restaurant or other such evil example of the spread of American culture. It's the end of the world as we know it, cry the defenders of civilization.
Or the ones who decry the lack of spiritual focus in the world today brought about by the crass consumerism of our society. The very same people also seem to have the money to afford to go on retreats costing thousands of dollars to pay someone to help them find their own personal guardian angel or listen to some faux guru tell them how to achieve enlightenment through the lightening of their wallets.
Both groups point their fingers pretty much in the same direction, away from themselves. To be fair, there is validity in their criticism. Outposts of the North American consumer society are this generation's Hudson Bay trading centers. Although, instead of selling the natives cheap whisky and pox infested blankets for furs, they are selling them cheap carbohydrates and the fast buck, high stress world of the quick profit.
For some countries, barely recovered from years of colonial oppression, it must feel like they've only just begun to reclaim some of the ground they'd lost when a new threat to their identity has appeared. But others, whose hands are not clean when it comes to a colonial past and are the most vociferous when it comes to complaints, have no such history to overcome.
What do nations, who have been around for thousands of years as the dominant culture from the Atlantic Ocean to as far East as Hong Kong and as far South to the atolls of the South Pacific, have to fear from a few McDonald's stands and movies? It's their own damn fault anyway. If they hadn't been so hell bent on destroying the existent cultures of the lands they traveled to, perhaps they never would have created the "monster" that plagues them today.
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