For my foreign readers [ if any]

for my foreign readers if any [ if any]

fiction
Edward w Pritchard


In many ways America appears to me to be an uncivilized Country. It shames me to say this about the place that I love and live in.

Our system of prisons when I think about it is barbaric. How we in America are so miserly with our handicapped citizens in proportion to our countries immense wealth shames me to consider. The fact that Guantanamo Bay silently officiously endures to defy common decency in the twenty first century is shocking and sickening. The greed of many Americans and the crass worship of wealth displayed in America is embarrassing.

I have never lived in another Country or in another time period of the past to properly judge my country, America, the United States against other Countries and civilizations from earlier eras. Perhaps all Countries are this way, despite the good, shocking bad and lacking in certain aspects if considered too intimately especially after one has lived a long time.

Only when I read the great authors of the past can I catch a fleeting glimpse of what other Countries than my own are really like. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, James Joyce, Proust and the writers of the Bible shine a light on human nature and by reading one can distill what is civilization and Judge the times and places the current reader lives in against historical standards.

Me, living in America now I sometimes  feel like Willie Loman the character created by Author Miller in his play " the Death of a Salesman". I especially feel this way when I drive my car about the place where I live. People honk and rush aggressively at me as I now drive a little slower because of diminishing eyesight, perceived unusually bad weather and preoccupation with my own thoughts. Little human decency is displayed by drivers where I live.

Henry David Thoreau wrote about and judged Americans in Concord Massachusetts in nineteenth century America and found them lacking. In the process he comes across as an aging curmudgeon.

Perhaps rather than a judgment of the place we live in, criticism of our country is just aging and is universal, a human trait displayed by the elderly in all countries and times and places.