I think the general perception in the world is that the USA is already big enough and strong enough to adequately help itself in an emergency, whereas that is not the case with more impoverished countries. Wouldn't that be normal? That's the part of the point I was making when I said that others did not rush in to help Imperial Rome...or the British at their height of power...or Napoleon at his height of power...because of the same perception that "they are big enough to take care of it themselves".

The normal assumption is that impoverished countries or countries that have just been devastated by a lost war or that simply don't have the monetary or material resources required to handle a disaster...those are the countries where the most aid is sent by other countries.

And is that surprising? We provide shelters in our cities for the homeless and unemployed poor. We do not provide shelters to house temporarily homeless millionaires, because they can already afford to rent a hotel room!

***

What Gordon Sinclair was drawing attention to (while overstating his case) was that some people simply use the USA as their fulltime whipping boy, and in so doing they are merely indulging themselves in the self-righteous joy of their favorite prejudice...anti-Americanism. Fine. Some people do that, for sure, and it's often unfair to the USA when they do. It does not, however, mean that everybody should keep their mouths shut when the USA flaunts international law and wages unjustifiable wars of aggression and occupation...as they did in Vietnam and as they have done more recently in Iraq.

He was drawing attention to someone else's prejudice...but mainly just because it was a different prejudice than his own.