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.”
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Jonathan Freedland
Guardian
-
Home Depots are the new epicenters of ICE raidsIn the Spotlight The chain has not provided many comments on the ongoing raids
-
Why does Trump keep interfering in the NYC mayoral race?Today's Big Question The president has seemingly taken an outsized interest in his hometown elections, but are his efforts to block Zohran Mamdani about political expediency or something deeper?
-
The pros and cons of banning cellphones in classroomsPros and cons The devices could be major distractions
