Lately I’ve noticed a lot of people on Tumblr have started to bash Americans, despite Tumblr being made and maintained by Americans. What bothers me the most is that the non-Americans (and even some Americans) are calling us “ignorant” and “stupid” for not knowing about the world’s problems to the depths that they think we should. One post that really struck a nerve with me was one that stated that Tumblr needed to stop being so “America-centric”.
Why should a blog site made by a team of Americans, with the vast majority of it’s users being American, stop being “America-centric”? As Americans, most of the users bring their American problems, stories, culture, and histories into the feed of every other user.
I mean, sure, a lot of the issues people talk about on Tumblr are dwarfed by other issues in other countries, but that doesn’t mean they’re invalid. Some of the points that the original poster made in their original post were about things that some people actually do know about like the fires in Canada, the possibility of Greece getting booted from the European Union, that Australia and the United Kingdom are being run by “Satan incarnates”, and that people around the world are still being persecuted for being LGBT+.
If the people who criticize America at every turn paid enough attention to what America actually does, they would’ve known that Colorado is sending much of the state’s fire department members to help with Canada’s fire problem and American economists predicted Greece’s debt problems would come and bite them in the butt some day. As odd as it may seem, someone in America started a Kickstarter to help with this problem. America has it’s own “Satan incarnates” to deal with in the political system within the U.S, plus, America is still dealing with persecution of LGBT+ people despite their marriage officially being legal within the U.S.
America is like that one friend who helps just about everyone without putting themselves first. When they finally get to the point where they have to think of themselves because of their own problems weighing down on them, they get labeled as selfish because they decided to think of themselves for once. The people of the world seem to spit on us for trying to help; and they only “love” America when it’s convenient for them. Yes, we’re going to feel bad when a natural disaster hits another country and we will probably send money or help to try and fix it, but right now we need to focus on our own troubles.
Even though I’m one of those people who often says “ew ‘murica sucks,” I’m an American and I can do that, because most of the time I’m joking. I’ll still defend my country if need be, even though we’ve done a lot of stuff, i.e. going into the Middle East for no apparent reason and making everyone over there hate us for meddling in their affairs, or American intervention somewhere else in the world that I’m sure happened at some point in time before I was even thought of.
When America meddles in the world’s affairs, they’re viewed as oppressive capitalistic pigs who don’t know anything, but when they don’t, then they’re heartless capitalistic pigs who don’t do anything good for the world. Either way, Americans are viewed as capitalistic pigs to just about everyone else because other countries hold grudges toward them about issues that happened decades ago that don’t even matter anymore.
As an entire nation of people left in the dark through censorship of all kinds of media and the government trying to cover things up, Americans can’t know every single thing about every single country. They’re not going to care about every single little issue that some insignificant country in the Pacific Ocean is having, but the people complaining about America outside (and inside for that matter) the U.S. should at least cut America some slack, as we’re a young and stupid nation that has it’s own problems that need to be resolved before it can take on the rest of the world’s problems.