But how did things get to such a point? What was it that allowed our country to have become so arrogant? Was it our taming of The West? Was it our near annihilation of The American Indian, the original inhabitants of this country? Was it our ability to have been so successful in an enslavement of The African American people? Was it our capacity to have economically ravaged Central America & The Caribbean? Was it our capacity for technological development?

How about our having bombed Viet Nam & Cambodia into near stone-age oblivion? Then there was our war with Iraq in 1991 & the fact that we were able to kill 350 Iraqis for every American soldier who died. And what about our ability to have been so good at polluting the earth’s atmosphere setting the stage for a rather tragic warming of the world?

What is it that seems to have paved the way toward empire? What is it about our own people that have made them so absolutely vulnerable, so inordinately willing to be led down the primrose path of a mad dash toward the building of a worldwide empire?

I'd like to suggest that there are 8 factors that have moved the American public to such a point. The first of which is an inclination toward ethnocentrism.

Americans seem to be wracked with ethnocentric bias, a rather pride-filled tendency to reject anything that isn't American, an attitude that leads our people to evaluate that which is American as better than that which isn't of American origin.

For example, it's common for Americans to believe that capitalism, the free enterprise system, is inherently better (more God-inspired) than any other economic arrangement, especially that of socialism which is, by many, considered to be evil & perhaps even devil-inspired.

And, of course, given our country’s current 9/11-oriented fear of another attack by “the terrorists,” the converse of such a proposition is a resolute hatred of The Moslem Faith as well as those of The Middle East who tend to follow its precepts. Representatives of the conservative-fundamentalist Christian community such as Franklin Graham, Pat Robertson & Jerry Falwell have pretty well summed up these folks feelings.

A second factor that seems to have created conditions conducive to “the empire-rization” of our country is the undeniability of how we, as a nation, have apparently normalized the fact of violence, how we have essentially created a “culture of violence” as a more or less accepted way of life in America.

I suggest that hidden within the American Mind is a rather peculiar attachment or, perhaps one could say, a kind of fondness for that of violence….. almost to the point that anyone who objects to the use of violence may be considered as either weak, impractical, Un-American, or perhaps even un-Godly.

Such a willingness to conveniently disregard, or perhaps even to deny, what used to be the quintessential fact of the Christian faith (that we should not do unto others that which we wouldn't have them do unto us) seems rather commonplace in “such a religious country” as that of America. As evidence for the normalization of (& likely the desensitization towards) violence in our country I offer the following:

The fact that The United States is the only developed country in the world that allows the use of capital punishment, and especially that of a willingness to execute children under 18 years of age (sometimes as young as 14 years of age), a willingness to use physical punishment (spanking) as a fundamental aspect of parental discipline, our country’s unwillingness to ban the use of handguns, the legalization of corporate practices that destroy the environment, the bastardization of the democratic nature of our union by allowing those with money to buy off those in the federal government, a general glamorization of violence in the media, the historical use of violence against minority groups (i.e. Native Indian Americans, Afro-Americans, women, homosexuals etc.), the increasing use of litigation as a form of violence, the legitimized use of violence in the advertising industry……... the tobacco company’s efforts to advertise their products to children (in order to replace those they have already killed) along with a willingness to allow themselves to be used as a way of destroying political careers, the acceptance of violence as an essential aspect of the video game industry, an historical unwillingness for schools to deal with the problem of bullying, the belief that war is an acceptable way to deal with international conflict, a general feeling that protest against war (standing up for peace) is an Un-American activity, the tendency to euphemize the killing of innocent civilians (parents, children, and friends) by referring to them as “collateral damage,” a rather confabulated attempt to condone impersonalized violence (killing people from afar…… as when people are slaughtered by missiles having been shot from hundreds of miles away), a rather fatuous belief that “might is right” (i.e. a belief that God has the “almighty right” to send anyone He wants to Hell, The Protestant Ethic’s “damning” of those who are poor, an extraordinary belief that our country along with its military power has been blessed by God), and a tendency for “the conservative-fundamentalist Christian community” to condone violence as an essential religious value (as found in The Old Testament of The Holy Bible). Again the list could go on but I think the point has been made.

Third, there seems to be a rather troubling tradition of spiritual duplicity, a feigned sense of religious piety that has taken hold of The American People. An appalling capacity for Americans to disregard the plight of others, an absence of compassion (empathic concern) for those less fortunate than ourselves, an essential unwillingness for the American people to put themselves into the place of others who, by any objective standard, have faired far less well than those in our own nation.

Based upon conversations in my classroom as well as with others “on the street,” it appears to me that Americans are severely limited in their capacity “to place themselves into the shoes of others.” For those of you who are older think about how most Americans felt when they discovered that nearly a quarter of a million Japanese (nearly all of them civilians) died as a result of our country having dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima & Nagasaki?

What were their feelings in regards to our firebombing of Tokyo in which 100,000 Japanese civilians died, or our incendiary bombing of Dresden, Germany in which nearly 300,000 German civilians were torched?

And then more recently, how many of you have run into friends who have anguished over the nearly one million Iraqis (at least 500,000 of whom were children) who died as a result of our 12-year economic embargo of Iraq, or the nearly 15,000 Iraqi civilians who have been killed as a result of our recent invasion of Iraq?

Not to belittle the tragedy of nearly 3,000 Americans having lost their lives on 9/11, but how is it possible that our own people (many of whom refer to themselves as Christian) have such a deep concern for “those of their own kind” while simultaneously exhibiting such a pittance of empathic concern for the many more who have died at the hands of our own comrades? Unfortunately, such seems to be a rather moot point for the Christian community!

A 4th factor that has caused so many Americans to bask in the arrogance of their own ignorance is a relatively profound lack of knowledge in regards to world history.