Tankdriver,

Your sentiments are straight from the Viet Nam era. They wern't relevant then and are much less so now.

The expression should be, "America, love it, or change it".

I didn't say there was anything wrong with the US, my only comment was that because of the rather prevasive xenophobia in this country Americans think that the US is the only country in the world worth living in. I have lived and traveled in enough foreign countries to know that this is really not true.

A country with 46 million people with no medical insurance, that ranks 40th in the world (one above Mexico) in life expectency, whose high school students rank 20th in the world, whose infant death rate ranks below all European and some third world countries, seems to me to have lost the bragging rights to being the best place to live.

Certainly the US can out produce most of the rest of the world in consumer goods, but, do we really need all the crap that we produce. Is this life style really something we should be proud of? Instead of concentrating on national health care, education, infant care, the environment, staying out of other countries affairs, etc. we direct our efforts on the short term gain. With more than 25% of our kids, and upwards of 60% of our adults classified as over weight we seem to spend more time building new Starbucks and Jack in the Boxs than worrying about the health, education and the longevity of our population.

With the amount of money this country has spent of the Iraq fiasco we could have easily solved all of the above problems and made the US an enviable place to live.