United States
Is this America? asked Paris’ Le Monde in an editorial. The entire world watched as American women and children wailed for help, as sick people expired of thirst on hot sidewalks. Such scenes of blacks fleeing devastation and despair are familiar from Somalia or Angola. Yet the images came from the world’s richest country. “America is discovering, or rediscovering, that it harbors the Third World in its own bosom.” The national shame must surely prompt some soul searching. “Is it reasonable to spend hundreds of millions to wage war on Iraq when America can’t even protect its own citizens?”
That’s because America doesn’t value community, said Doug Saunders in the Toronto Globe and Mail. It has never been a country of people pulling together in a joint project, but a pioneer land of self-reliance. Those “individualistic, egalitarian, anti-authoritarian values” have made the United States succeed. But the flip side of that virtue is “an every-man-for-himself ethos that can destroy the system itself.”
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Jonathan Freedland
Guardian
