Book Quote: Why Do People Hate America?

I was re-reading some parts of Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change for a talk I gave on faith and politics at church the other day and I ran across a quote–actually a quoted quote–that really struck me.

In one of his chapters dealing with economics (I can’t remember which at the moment) McLaren quotes Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies’ book Why do People Hate America? (which I’m going to have to take a serious look at now). This seems especially poignant as I hear the newscasters speak of economic recession and I see banks and corporations rushing to ensure that their collective head will be kept above the water, while women and children on the other side of the world are rushing to ensure they will eat today. Here’s the quote:

The US has simply made it too difficult for other people to exist. . .[they have] structured the global economy to perpetually enrich itself and reduce non-Western societies to poverty. “Free markets” is simply a euphemism for free mobility of American capital, unrestrained expansion of American corporations, and free (unidirectional) movement of goods and services from America to the rest of the world.

And the truly sad part of it all is, for me at least, the daunting reality that we (Americans) would rather play semantics and argue about what “recession” actually means and how that affects our impressive and trendy mortgage, how the “free market” should or shouldn’t function in society, and whether capitalism is intrinsically evil or not than working for actual, tangible transformation (Notice how I just avoided the “c-word.” It’s a great word, but given the recent overuse, I’m trying to find different descriptors. When speaking about economics and politics, especially in Western society–particularly the US–I think “transformation” best describes what we should be working for.).

~bh ><>