So I am listening to my regular morning show, the Today show, and Matt Lauer is in St. Petersburg, Russia. In a piece on the city, he asked two separate men (neither actually Russian!) what the Russian people thought about their country becoming "less" democratic. Did they have a problem with it? The answers where pretty much the same. As long as civil and personal liberties were not affected, they didn't have a problem with it.
Why? Why!? Why does everyone have to follow our model exactly? The narrow views of Americans can just get to me. It may surprise some of you that we do not have a perfect government! Why would anyone else model theirs after ours exactly? I wouldn't.
A similar thing happened on my favorite reality program, The Amazing Race. The teams were traveling through a very lush and beautiful part of Ethiopia that also didn't have many modern luxuries. A very naive model wondered how the people could live like that! Um ... flushing toilets and running hot and cold are not givens world wide just because you can't live with out it. As a matter of fact, most of the world lived with out those very things quite nicely. Yes, these people lived in huts with dirt floors, but is how they live! Just because you find it too rustic, doesn't mean they are in misery.
Not that I would want to give up hot and cold running water, but it isn't exactly the gold standard.
God bless Russia! May its government find a better way then ours!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment