Dear Editor,

Kurt Sorensen’s article last week titled “America: Love it or leave it” led me to question whether Sorensen and the real world are even tangentially connected with each other.

The article was a regurgitation of the simple-minded, sound-byte rhetoric that the media uses to strip an issue of all its substance and reduce our opinions to gut reactions in which facts have no bearing.

The United States is an extraordinary country that generally promotes admirable values and plays a positive role in the world.

But it is both arrogant and ignorant to imply that out of the world’s 200-odd countries, the United States is the only one worth living in.

Are these distinctions that Sorensen makes between “the greatest country in the world” and “the rest of the world” based on visits to foreign countries that he has personally found to be vastly inferior to the United States?

Pegging ourselves as the greatest country in the history of the world and contending that Americans should pack their bags if they don’t love their country so much that it hurts makes us look like swaggering, elitist jerks to the rest of the world.

Our American identity could benefit from a little more humility.

Dan Brutlag

SJU Senior

Filed under: Letters, Opinion by Jennifer Mattson