Mel's Favorite Comment

From the pajama's media article about Americans and entitlement.

Hello,

I am a Romanian who has just come back to his country from two years of Graduate School at East Tennessee State University, opportunity for which I am very thankful to the American tax-payers who have offered me a scholarship.

After reading your sublime article about the simplicity of the American Dream and the sense of entitlement more and more Americans feel these days, I cannot help but remember that Romanians have never had a shot at that dream. And also, cannot help but remember the sense of entitlement coming out from SOME of the classes I took at (incredibly)ETSU.

I am from an ex-communist country, where the marxist-leninist idiotic utopies have been well tested on my grandfather, whose land was taken and put into “collective property” and who was sent two years in jail for protesting; he came out almost deaf from the beatings, and on my father who (as late as 1987 was indicted and almost sent to prison for refusing to spy on his French guests).

My American friends, please don’t go there! Twenty years after communism fell, that feeling of entitlement is still crippling the spirit of some of my compatriots. Please, don’t let yourself fooled by the empty rhetoric of the quasi-socialist in your classrooms. They don’t know s**t about what that means when you put it in practice.

Romanians have always dreamt of going to America, the land of opportunity. Please, don’t dream of becoming the Socialist Republic of Romania!

After so much time of being lost in ideology Romanians are taking a stab at the American Dream. We have a flat income tax of 16 percent, regardless if you are a person or a business and Romania is flourishing with foreign investments pouring in from all sides and the economy growing through the roof. Unemployment is very low and only if you are lazy you cannot work. I don’t understand why you won’t have that. My marketing professor at ETSU, Dr. Ronald Weir said he could only dream for the U.S. to have a tax system like in Romania.

And one more thing. During a class at ETSU I just had to raise this question to the overwhelming opposition of American students. I asked them: “Why do you hate your country so much? I’ve always loved it and I’m not even American”