The Sand Bar

It’s always easier to blame another for your own mistakes than it is to blame yourself. The tension between Russia and the United States is a result of this back-and-forth blaming game that needs to end before any sort of diplomacy can take place. Cathy Young attributes the tensions to “anti-american sentiment”, a “perceived threat to Russian security”, and Russia’s “post-cold war humiliation”. Although these are certainly contributions to the tension, I wouldn’t go so far as to say they are the primary cause.

Young seems to imply that if Russians would just one day stop hating America, that the state of our fragile relationship would be fixed. In the short term, this may be true, but after many years, we would find ourselves once again bickering over who’s to blame.

The cause of our tension is more fundamental. The West has never really taken the time to understand Eastern culture, and likewise for the East. I’ve never personally been to Russia, but I have been to China and Ukraine. In both of those countries, life is much different than over here in the States. The consumer mindset of buy, buy, buy does not exist in China and Ukraine to the same extent that it exists in the US. In the Ukrainian households that I stayed at while I visited the country, their clothes, furniture, and overall decor were fascinatingly simple, clean, and gave me a sense of purity. The families all seemed to take so much pride in their belongings, giving me a sense that they were deeply appreciative of everything they had. In America, I feel like that sense of pride and appreciation is somewhat lost. Bombared by television ads and water-cooler chats about the latest gadgets and electronics, we have become an unsatiable monster, constantly desiring the latest and greatest to come out of the factories.

It’s easy to see how Easterners would think of us as greedy. What they fail to understand, though, is that our consumerist mindset is derived from our capitalist economy and democratic government, and is thus interwoven into our American culture. They fail to realize that our economy is built on the masses buying goods and services. Even though we are perhaps the most consumerist society in the world, we are also at the same time the greatest, most powerful driving force of any economy. In what other country does money exchange hands at the magnitude and the rate that it does here in America? Wealth, therefore, is not accumulated in the hands of a few, but is created, and circulated amongst the hands of many. Because of this, we as a country are able to have higher standards of living than many other countries.

Young postulates that the result of the economic downturn in Russia after the cold war resulted in an inferiority complex toward the West. She sites a few poll numbers that paint the picture that Russians collectively desire an American way of life. I disagree. Young didn’t cite the exact poll questions, so they could have been worded in a way to favor an American perspective. I think what the polls really meant were that Russians would prefer a safer, more economically stable Russia, not a Russia-that-pretends-to-be-America. Like I said before, the Ukrainians I met were immensely proud in their belongings. Likewise, they were also immensely proud of their heritage. In the rural sunflower town of Yalta, it was hard to find anybody that wanted to uproot and move to America. Ukraine was their home, and they were proud of it, even if they didn’t have fifty-inch plasma TV’s hanging off their walls.

It’s so easy for Americans to assume that everybody wants to be like us. But instead of pushing our own political agendas on the world, trying to convert every country we encounter into a poorly-emulated version of ourselves (Iraq comes to mind), we should be more understanding of foreign culture and help them help themselves. Like Obama once said during his past campaign, “We should lead by the power of our example, not by the example of our power.”