18/ The 2 domestic migration stories most Americans know — Underground Railroad and Grapes of Wrath — just don’t convey the significance and richness of population movements in human history. Americans have never had to*leave* America in large numbers.
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29/ So when I see America being cruel to people who are at high risk of losing half of their cultural beings, it feels like a spectacle of willful cultural violence and really bad global citizenship.
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30/ It feels especially selfish coming from a country that could wage 2 world wars and a Cold War at a safe remove and then reshape entire continents to its liking in the aftermath, without even gaining the label of “colonial power”
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31/ For almost 100 years, America has been free to take the best of the rest of the world, be mostly insulated from troubles caused both by itself and other powers. Arrange a planet’s worth of raw materials, carbon-sink forests, markets etc for its benefit.
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32/ And now it has the gall to act like the injured exploited party, take its resources and retreat behind its isolationist borders, loudly claiming it is the rest of the world that is “ungrateful”? Takes a very special, heavily edited sense of world history to do that.
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Flip side of this is that it is possible to become American* in 1-2 generations. My grandparents' culture was erased, but me and my parents get the benefit of this creeping Americanism.
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*mileage may vary based on skin color and zip code
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