Are Americans Turning a Corner?

Sometimes you find inspiration in unusual places. I did today in an article written by columnist Rami Khouri in Lebanon's Daily Star:


"I've just spent seven weeks in the United States and encountered hundreds of students, professors and other ordinary citizens all around the country who share a set of powerful ideas - personal liberty, pluralism, and equal rights and opportunities guaranteed by the rule of law. Yet America also runs into great difficulties when it takes its ideals around the world on the back of its army trucks and air force planes. Consequently, American society is tempered today by some humility, anchored in genuine perplexity.

"The militant arrogance and aggressive self-assuredness that often defined American public and foreign policy in recent years have given way in places to a more humble spirit of inquiry. Everywhere I went, Americans asked the same questions: Why does the world resist American attempts to promote democracy? Why do so many people all over the world criticize the US? Why is the American "noble" mission in Iraq going so badly?

"Based at Stanford University in northern California, then at Northeastern University in Boston, I traveled throughout the land and heard citizens everywhere ask honest questions about how the US should best behave in the world. I encountered only the rare wild accusations about Arabs and Muslims or equally jingoistic assertion that "America knows best." If the world changed for Americans after 9/11, it seems to be changing again these days, and for the better.

"Typical were the questions I had from a class of over 300 students at Northeastern University on globalization and international affairs - itself a sign of the growing interest here in learning about the world, rather than sending the troops abroad to rearrange it. A few energized students slammed me as a "raving fanatic" and asked how I dared to deliver my "ideologically skewed views in a society with freedom of thought," and I thanked them for their candor and for keeping me on my toes."

Khouri's comments deliver a ray of hope that many Americans have finally broken free of the 9/11 trauma and subsequent propaganda that fueled their confusion, fear and anger and are willing again to approach the world and its problems with a broader, more balanced and yes, nuanced, outlook. There is hope.