[Targan]

Ain't no lords and ladies in my country. We started out as a penal colony for cryin' out loud! And as for this notion that the USA is a glorious land of equality and egalitarianism, well let's be honest, thats a very pretty notion but it's a fiction. If you come from money you've got a hell of a lot more chance of leaving this world with money too than if you started with nothing. It's not all that different here, I'm happy to admit that. But the richest of the rich in the US easily rival the wealthiest of the old European nobility, only difference is there's no fancy titles and coats of arms on the walls. The greatest of the modern free market economies worship wealth as a far greater virtue than a fair go for everyone. Call me a hopeless pinko if you like but that's just how it is, for better or for worse. You can have all the guns you want in your back woods bunker but when you go up against the might of real money, private or corporate (or government for that matter) you're little more than chaff in the wind.

As for carving out a civilised nation from a vast untamed land full of beasts and savages, at least for the last couple of thousand years the Europens have been butchering each other on a roughly equal footing. In America (and Australia, and New Zealand, and lots of other former European colonies) "civilising" the land is just a polite euphemism for a technologically and numerically superior people engaging in outright land theft and genocide against the indigenous peoples. In the times of the expanding frontiers in America the European descendants were more likely to be using their guns against the first peoples than each other or other European invaders.

But that's now our history, long past. Much as the circumstances leading to the writing of our various constitutions and their amendments are also long gone. Homesteading and a pioneering spirit 200 years ago doesn't necessarilly automatically result in a political and sociological situation like that in the US.

We've all probably well crossed the line of political ranting by now in this thread and I for my part am sorry for that. I say again, I'm not trying to tell anyone else how their country should be run. But I am calling out hypocrisy and fantasising as I see it. If this is hitting too many raw nerves and generating too much ill-will, I'll stop right here.