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Errinundera wrote:

I find it odd when Americans express their lack of trust in Government. In a democracy the Government is "us". It is our bulwark against misfortune and misbehaviour and is our only way of restraining powerful interests whose intentions are inimical to our wellbeing. To mistrust Government is to lack faith in ourselves and to cede power to those who would do us harm. That is why the loudest voices shouting, "government is bad," are those powerful interests who seek to preserve their advantages.

Anyway, I need to get on with recording, for the upcoming election, those NS players in Forest who take their citizenship roles seriously.

This is very well said. As an American who, oddly, does value the government and has a much greater fondness for the apparatus of the government (if not the people who are in it, seemingly ever...), I entirely agree with you. I would offer that that particular American sentiment, which is variously shared at some point by virtually everyone here, stems in part from the long-standing suspicion and latent-to-explicit lack of respect as a rule for any and all authorities, experts, hierarchy, etc. From whatever actual grounding there may have been in the actual motivations of the people living at the time of the American Revolution and westward expansion, modern and contemporary America has imagined and held itself to basically have been "destined for greatness from the beginning," so to speak, because we "threw off the British!" *muscles arms*, and because we "set out to tame the great New World" *flashy smile*, and more recently because we "saved the world twice," once with our "'new-clear' bombs," and because we have awesome STUFF and entertainment and we're just sort of...well... fat now, and with decaying road networks and stupid suburbs all over everything. Yay. But goddamnit, "we sure showed em', huh?! Best in da world!" *high fives*

I sort of lost the thread of it, but I mean to say that it is, both in effect and also as a matter of cultural pride, a very "American" thing to not just give the middle finger to government once it's done something wrong (and to be sure, the Federal Government has done a lot of nasty, scary, and plain of wrong sh!t sometimes, even to its own citizens), but just for the sake of giving "The Man" the middle finger.

We're the kid who wears sunglasses inside on a rainy day, just because once, someone told us to take them off or risk looking like either an ass or a blind person. We're good at being the former, and increasingly we're becoming the latter.