America - The Land of Thieves?

I woke up this morning with a bit of migraine, so I had a lot less tolerance for bullshit then I usually do (which is not much to begin with but that is beside the point). As you may have guessed, I received a whole truckload of it in my eleven o’clock comparative politics course. While discussing the political as well as the economic and social differences between the United States of America and the European Union (I still get a kick out of it every time I use it), a woman in my class went on a tirade about how the United States was this imperialist nation that stole lands from the French (well, who would expect them to give up much of a fight), the English, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Mexicans, and, lest we forget, the Indians. I can no longer distinguish the point she was attempting to make with this argument in regards to the topic of the discussion, but I believe it would be a pointless endeavor to do so. In any event, all the while she is ranting and raving, I am sitting in my desk rolling my eyes in disgust. With the exceptional amount of money we pay for tuition at Marquette I thought, even when dealing with a liberal, that people on campus would be above this sort of childish bantering, but I guess I was naïve in that assumption. Having waste precious minutes of my class time for her anti-American soapboxing, I could hardly let this stand. In response I said, “Well, perhaps you would care to give the land back to the Mexicans, the French, the Dutch, the English, and the Spanish, and apologize yourself”. I cannot speak for the rest of the class but I at least felt a lot better having said that and set the record straight.