Looking at America From Here

America is loved and America is hated. Both emotions are fierce and both may be dangerous. America is hated because it is viewed as an imposer of its ways and an inflictor of undesirable aspects of its culture on other cultures. Its ways are often considered poisonous and damaging to other people's ways of living, thinking, functioning. America does not see it this way, because America has a bleeding heart. It is a nation of empathy. Granted, there is cruelty, and much of it there; and America, in its openness, beams its people's brutishness up to its satellites and splatters it across the planet while announcing clearly "If you do not wish to see it, turn away from the television set".
 But just as it is difficult for America's own citizens to watch the heartless behavior of its relatively small number of insane, so is America unable to stomach the cruelty inflicted upon men, women and children in other parts of the globe where there are no satellites beaming to such nations' huddled masses; and Americans have very vivid imaginations: they do not have to see it to sense it, nor  be nearby to visualize it happening to them.
 America's understanding the world is of this planet as a tiny place, after all they have watched it from the moon, and they know its ignorance is able to reach them. The difference between America and the rest of us is that America is able to do something about it; at least up to this point.
 It is difficult for most of America to stomach cruelty and wrong. Sure they may very well watch it on their television sets and in their cinemas, flinching at ever spatter of blood, wiping away streaming tears, clinging frightfully to each other in the semidarkness of their movie halls, and then going home to horrific nightmares But these things remind them of what they do not wish America to become, and this is what drives America to  imagine itself having the manifest destiny to tramp through the "muck" of the planet, driven by a deeply compelling, often misguided but compassionate impulse to rescue the rest of humanity.