My Take
By
QUINCY TROUPE
It’s early September, two
months from the 2012
presidential election.
Make no mistake about it, this potentially
nation-changing decision is the most
important political decision people of the
United States will make in quite some time,
because whoever is chosen — incumbent
Democratic President, Barack Obama, or
his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney —
voters must understand how, on the one
hand, this choice will divide the nation
because of the starkly different agendas of
each candidate, and, on the other hand,
the choice will mirror how the United States
views itself and how it will be viewed in
the rest of the world.
4
Today, whether many Americans realize it,
or not, the world outside our borders has
changed dramatically over the past decades
and is now filled with seismic divides —
demographic, racial, ethnic, economic,
political, social and religious — that many
in this country did not see coming, nor
thoroughly understand. Further, it is still a
fact that too many Americans citizens never
travel outside the country and don’t even
have passports. Also, a majority of
Americans speak only “American English”
and see others in the world as inferior to
what they deem as American greatness.
These shifts in the rest of the world are
intricate and must be negotiated with a
surgeon’s scalpel, a delicate, steady hand
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