Xenophobia
A dislike of foreigners and racial intolerance is quite common among us humans. The Germans don’t like the Turks, the Dutch don’t like the Germans, the Americans don’t like the Mexicans, Mexicans with light skin don't like Mexicans with dark skin, and ignorant people with white skin in Georgia and Mississippi don’t like the people who have darker colored skin even if they have a vastly superior education compared to the white red necks.
A well rounded liberal education and plenty of foreign travel helps dispel this hatred of foreigners and these ignorant stereotypes. Living and working abroad is even better.
If I think about the thousands of people I have know over the years, the top ten list of decent, honest people includes very few white skinned Americans. Most of the people who I really liked and trusted were foreigners or people with darker skin. I’m thinking about many of these people now, but there is no real value to naming names.
When the postman or the UPS guys comes to the front door, most domestic dogs will start barking vigorously, and some will go totally ballistic with a desire to injure and kill. My little black furry friend wags his tail when the door bell rings because he understands that almost always when someone comes to our front door they mean us well and are bearing gifts. And many times he gets to run out front without a leash on and make friends with them. One time he even jumped right up into the UPS guy’s truck.
If a person of mixed race brutally killed a white girl in Louisiana or Mississippi the trial would proceed fairly rapidly, and the “darkie” would probably be found guilty and eventually put to death. This happens in America pretty often even when there are no witnesses and fairly marginal forensic evidence.
When a white American girl and her Italian boyfriend brutally kill a foreigner of mixed race while living in Italy, the trial takes nine months. Some things are admissible as evidence which would not be in the American courts. At the end of the process the American girl who is found guilty automatically gets an appeal under the Italian system of jurisprudence. There is no death penalty in Italy. The Italian courts are overseen by the European court of human rights.
Getting up on one's high horse over this issue is a clear cut case of misdirected moral outrage. One only has a limited quantity of moral outage, and it should be used wisely.
Of my sixty years total (call it 40 years as an adult), almost twenty years (call it half) were spent living abroad. First in Germany and then in the Netherlands. I have travelled widely to other countries. My experience is that there are many different ways to skin a cat. Things work somewhat differently in foreign countries, but often achieve the same result - or sometimes even better results. A great many things actually are far better abroad. The police are better educated and trained in Holland than in the USA. No one goes bankrupt or loses their house because they come down with cancer. In France one’s education is paid for by the government. All the way through a university education.
The “American Way” is that young people are forced deeply into debt if they choose to go to college, and the “American Way” is that you soon lose your job if you get really sick. Without a job one’s marriage frequently fails. You soon lose your health insurance and access to modern medical care, and before you die you are forced into bankruptcy and may even lose your house. If one feels like being morally outraged then one should think about the million dollar bonsuses paid to the Wall Street traders at the companies which were bailed out by the tax payers; or maybe the murders and extortion taking place in Juarez, Mexico.
Save your moral outrage for those times and issues where it may actually do some good.
I am amazed at how much intolerance and ignorance this conviction in Italy is bringing out in my fellow Americans. We usually hide our hatred of foreigners better than this. This redirection of moral outrage is being used by the right wing to take peoples' eyes off the ball. There are really imortant issues happening right now like health care reform, financial regulatory reform, and unpaid-for-wars which are leading the country towards bankruptcy. It is sad to see people wasting their moral outrage on this issue.
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