long but excellent article, (somewhat tells a similar story to my own)
http://www.alternet.org/audits/119065/now_i_understand_why_they_hate_us/?page=2Now I Understand Why They Hate Us
By David Hilfiker, AlterNet. Posted January 12, 2009.
How a middle-class white guy came to accept the evil embedded in American political and military might.
Inner-City Injustice
In 1983, I moved to Washington, D.C., to practice medicine in a small clinic in an economically devastated African American ghetto. The injustice of inner-city Washington appalled me. The public perception -- then as now -- was that the behavior of the poor was primarily responsible for their poverty, but as I worked in the midst of that devastation, it soon became obvious that the racism and injustice of our society were the primary causes of the poverty, indeed, the primary causes of even the behavior of the impoverished (for instance, poor education or single parenthood) that society held responsible for the poverty. Still confident in the goodness of our society, however, I naively assumed that correcting the misperception required only educating affluent Americans about the real conditions oppressing the poor, so I began lecturing and writing. I discovered, however, that most affluent people were too comfortable to confront truths challenging their beliefs that they had earned their comfort or that the poor were themselves responsible for not earning theirs. I was beginning to understand that we were not the light to the world I had imagined.
The juxtaposition of the personal generosity of many Americans with their unwillingness to recognize the injustice that made their affluence possible was striking. Most people I knew would reach out to an individual poor person in their community with help, but they were unwilling even to acknowledge the structures that caused the poverty in the first place. Why did moral people not recognize the immorality of their society? I recognize the truth of Brazilian archbishop Dom Helder Camara's statement, "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist." It was not enough to keep oneself morally upright and charitable; one had also to confront the structures that elevated some and oppressed other.
During my first years in Washington in the 1980s, I belonged to a faith community that was actively involved in protesting the U.S. role in Central America. Although I was personally more involved with the injustice in the inner city, the direct participation of trusted friends in Central America offered me a very different view of our government's actions there than was available in the mainstream media. The United States was actively involved in supporting military dictatorships in Guatemala and El Salvador, providing military aid and equipment to these, and other, repressive governments, and training their military and police officers in brutal tactics, all of which led to the massacres of hundreds of thousands of people. The Reagan administration defied congressional restrictions and funded right-wing attacks on the democratically elected Nicaraguan Sandinista government; it also mined harbors in Nicaragua, an action later denounced by the International Court of Justice. Yet there was very little coverage of any of this in our mainstream media. I watched our government simply stonewall what it was doing, lying to the American people.
...more..
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