but all the rapes and murders of the 1700's don't get heaped on me because I identify as a human. But yet when I identify as an american, well then we get to bring up slavery and killing the native Americans. It's bullshit. I didn't have anything to do with it and when weighed with the rest of America's contribution to the world (economically, philosophically, scholarly), the bad barely registers on the scale.

America is the A+ student, who volunteers at the homeless shelter and teaches at-risk kids how to read. But the only thing that certain people can ever bring up is that it shot a squirrel once with his BB gun when he was five years old.

Don't get me wrong, I have very serious concerns with the way civil liberties are being treated as of late and we should absolutely make sure the abuses and wrongs are taken care of now. But constantly bring up shit from 200 years ago is what bugs the hell out of me.

> America is the A+ student, who volunteers at the homeless shelter and teaches at-risk kids how to read.

Do you really see the US this way, honestly? A country that's basically been terrorizing other countries almost non-stop since the 50's/60's. The last "A+" assignment the US had was World War II. There have been quite a lot of squirrels getting shot ever since.

I find the discussion about slavery to be pretty pointless too, mostly because all it accomplishes is to take people's attention away from the pretty obvious truth that the US has been 'raping and pillaging' almost constantly for half of the last century. To borrow your high school (I guess?) analogy: America is the former A+ student that helped (greatly) to bring down the high school bully, then slowly started transforming into that bully, only with less anti-semitism and quite a bit more islamophobia.