As many of you may know, a woman recently lost her camera on a trip to Hawaii and started blogging about it. In particular, this post seemed to draw a number of comments like "Oh, I'm so embarrassed that they're Canadian", or "Hey, not all Canadians are like these two", or even one fellow who felt the need to speculate that the U.S. needed to have another skyscraper destroyed because it makes good TV.
Leaving the last nut aside for the minute, this kind of talk takes me back to the run-up to the 2004 election, where Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks felt the need to inform a London crowd, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas". This incident has been analyzed, dissected, shouted about and written about before. I never quite understood why they thought there wouldn't be any backlash from it. Is there some disease that affects celebrities such that they believe that everyone, everywhere is going to treat what they say as the One and Only Truth?
Anyway, it led me to think that a lot of people seem to feel the need to function as apologists for their countrypeople (or really, other members of whatever group they happen to be part of). I was no more ashamed to be a white American male between 25 and 35 when Tim McVeigh blew up the Murrah building than I was the day prior. Why not? Because McVeigh's crime was (at least partly) against my group, in addition to him being part of my group. I knew that the vast majority of other white American males between 25 and 35 would look at his behavior as non-representative, and with that "insulation", I felt no need to create distance by apologizing for my group.
I guess the issue is pride. "We believe our group (Americans, Texans, whatever) is so wonderful", the logic seems to go, "that anyone from it is endowed by their Creator with an inalienable aura of wonderfulness, incapable of causing offense to anyone." And when someone from that group turns out to be a turd in the toilet of life, we're shocked, SHOCKED that one of us could act in that fashion, and it embarrasses us so much that we quickly scramble to apologize to them. When the offense by a member of our group targets someone who is not in our group, we get nervous. We worry about what the other group will think of us. We worry that the other group is not as enlightened as us, not as capable of distinguishing grey as we are. We worry that the offending member will be regarded as representative of our group, and that our group will be held responsible for that person's acts.
Human beings are, at their basest level, little better than animals. Their ability to engage in asocial behavior is not inherent in their nationality, ethnicity, faith, physical features, etc., it's inherent in their genes. Ultimately, we're all part of one group: human beings. True, society shapes people, and provides them incentives to overcome their baser nature. And certainly there are national, ethnic, faith and other elements to society. But if I reach into a bag of 300 million peanut M&Ms and get a green one of a particular shape, who's to blame if I assume that all 299,999,999 remaining M&Ms will be exactly the same? The M&M? The remaining M&Ms? Or me?
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