Hating America

A troll at Protein Wisdom, claiming to have a PhD and teaching at a University commented that:

The USA is a sick, diseased, cancer, blight on the earth. This is a fact. You guys are in denial about it and hate the fact that I’ve got the chutzpah to hang here and tell it like it is.

A question can legitimately be raised: if you hate the country you live in so much, why do you continue to live here? This is not an “America, love it or leave it” challenge, it’s a real question.

I am an immigrant. I did not make the decision to leave my birth country; my parents did. But they left it nevertheless and moved to America. Literally millions of Mexicans are leaving their country to move to America. The lines to come to America legally are long but people are standing in line for years to do so.

So the concept of leaving the country of one’s birth and moving to another is as old as mankind. So why would anyone who loathes their country, has a PhD and could be expected to make a living virtually anywhere in the world want to stay?

There is no Berlin Wall to keep anyone in; no armed guards at the borders to shoot you should you try to leave. Buy a plane ticket to travel anywhere in the world. Get in you car and drive to Canada or Mexico. What is it that keeps a person in a place they hate?

As an immigrant to the United States, this is a perplexing question. Was the comment made for its effect and the hatred not real? Is the hatred real but does the comment come from a person with a need to feel persecuted; in other words is there a serious psychological problem? Or, if the comment is true, does the thought of actually leaving not enter her consciousness as one of several alternative strategies. I suspect that there is something in the American psyche that says “people move to America, not away from America.” And this is undoubtedly true of people who genuinely hate America.

I’m a history buff and have always been intrigued by the history of Rome. During the empire, Caesar’s enemies who were marked for death, were sometimes given the opportunity to commit suicide and did so by slitting their veins in a bathtub. Why didn’t they run? Perhaps because to them, Rome was the world and there was no place to run that was not Rome. Most people, whether they know it or not, inhabit prisons of their own creation. They may be mental prisons, but they are stronger than iron bars. And here we have exhibit “A.”