THE AMERICAN WHAT? chapter 2 of the america actually kinda sucks sometimes series

America is often referred to as the best country on Earth. We are all reminded of this every Memorial Day when everyone gets drunk and pigs out on barbecue. We are reminded of it again every Independence Day when everyone gets drunk and pigs out on barbecue again. And I am oddly in agreement with all the fat, drunk, flag wavers out there--America is the best country in the world.
The problem that I have is that, while I have great respect for our veterans, I don’t think they are the entire reason. I certainly don’t think our government is the reason that America is so great. America was not made great by our “inventive nature” or our “free spirit”. Considering our country’s history the question should not be “Why is our country so great?” but “How could our country NOT be so great?”.
When the first Western European colonists came to what would someday be America, there was little to stand in the way of them doing whatever they wanted. Sure, occasionally the natives would destroy our settlements (and, in retrospect, it kinda looks like self-defense now, doesn’t it?) but soon many of them were dead from being infected by European diseases which they had no immunity to and also we called in troops to kill the rest. After that we rounded up the survivors, cut their hair, taught about Jesus, and forbid them to speak their native language. We then tuned them into alcoholics so that we could steal the rest of the land that they lived on.
Next, we cut down as many trees as we could on what was then the largest unspoiled piece of real estate on the planet. We created huge fields in the southern portions that could be planted with a variety of crops. Then, due to our creative spirit, we figured out a great way to work these fields without machinery(because machines hadn’t been invented yet). We bought and sold millions of Africans because we didn’t consider them real humans and used them as slave labor for a couple hundred years.
Next, when slavery became unfashionable, we made it illegal and instead started sweatshop textile mills that made massive wealth by exploiting women and children for nearly free labor in dangerous work environments where many actually died from accident or exhaustion. When sweatshops became unfashionable in the U.S., we opened them in third-world countries instead.
After that we would invent nuclear weapons and become the only country in the world to kill tens of thousands of innocent people in a split second in order to end a horrible war a little bit early. After that, we would spend the next 60 years invading countries for no good reason.
America is a steroid-laden baseball player--breaking all the rules and winning all the games. So I ask you--How could we lose? How could we NOT be great?