Last week, His Excellency Hem Heng, Cambodian ambassador to the U.S., gave a particularly uncomfortable lecture. I felt confident going in to his lecture because I knew about Cambodia, I was, at the very least, aware of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot’s reign of terror. But, the longer I sat there, the more uneasy I felt. I had no clue how much the United States had supported the Khmer Rouge, financially, politically, militarily. And here this man, who had lived through the Cambodian enslavement, was telling me that the United States was a main supporter, but nobody stood up and told him he was wrong, meaning, he must be telling the truth. It’s just that I, being particularly uninformed, had never known just how involved the U.S. became in Pol Pot’s killing spree. As I looked around me, I saw that the girl next to me had no clue what the Khmer Rouge was and instead was drawing pictures of the US bombing cattle in Cambodia and I realized that maybe the rest of my generation was just like me, wholly unaware. That’s about when I started feeling particularly uncomfortable. How many other situations have we (as a country) been in where we steamrolled over other countries, over other people, to put ourselves in a better position?
As the “most powerful country in the world” the U.S. exploits quite a lot of situations, we stick our opinions, our noses, our guns into places that they simply do not belong and we get away with whatever we’d like to do because other countries are less powerful than us, and thus have less say. Granted, we do our best to help countries that are revolting, starving, dying, but the fact is, we also do a lot of harm. Our politicians are intrusive, decisive and outright rude sometimes. Is this the way that our country would prefer to be? Do we as the citizens want a government who financially supports a dictator in Egypt simply because we need ties to the US, or should we start saying no? Should we start standing up for ourselves and saying “NO. I do not want other people in the world to suffer simply because I am part of a country so enormous that it does not know its own boundaries” Here’s to facing things that make us uncomfortable, to politicians who misrepresent the people, to a military that exploits, to a president who makes decisions that we the people would never make. Here’s to saying no.
Start with this one:
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