The United States dollar took another pounding on German, French and British exchanges this morning, hitting the lowest point ever known in West Germany. It has declined there by 41% since 1971 and this Canadian thinks it is time to speak up for the Americans as the moste generous and possibly the least-appreciated people in all the earth.

As long as sixty years ago, when I first started to read newspapers, I read the floods on the Yellow River and the Yangtze. Who rushed in with men and money to help? The Americans did.

They have helped control floods on the Nile, the Amazon, Ganges, and Niger. Today, the rich bottom land of the Mississippi is under water and no foreign land has sent a dollar to help. Germany, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy, were lifted out of the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of dollars and forgave other billions in debts. None of those countries is today paying even the interest on its remaining debts to the United States.

When the franc was in danger of collasping in 1956, it was the Americans who propped it up and their reward was to be insulted and swindled on the streets of Paris. I was there. I saw it.

When distant cities are hit by earthquakes, it is the United States that hurries to help... Managua Nicaraqua is one of the most recent examples. So far this spring, 59 American communities have been flatened by tornadoes. Nobody has helped.

The Marshall Plan...Truman Policy...all dumped billions upon billions of dollars into discouraged countries. Now, newspapers are writing about the decadent, war-mongering Americans.

I'd like to see one of these countries that is gloating over the erosion of the United States dollar build its own airplanes. Come on...let's hear it! Does any other country in the world have a plane to equal the Boeing Jumbo Jet, the Lockheed Tristar or the Douglass 10? If so, why don't they fly them? Why do all international airlines except Russia fly American lanes? Why does no other land on earth even consider putting a man or woman on the moon?

You talk about Japanese techocrazy and you get radios. You talk about German technocrazy and you get automobiles. You talk American technocrazy and you find men on the moon, not once, but several times...and safely home again. You talk about scandals and the Americans put theirs right in the store window for everyone to look at. Even the draft dogers are not pursued and hounded. They are here on our streets, most of them...unless they are breaking Canadian laws...or getting American dollars from Ma and Pa at home to spend here.

When the Americans get out of this bind...and they will...who could blame them if they said "the hell with the rest of the world. Let someone else buy the bonds. Let someone else build or repair foreign dams or design foreign buidlings that won't shake apart in earthquakes".

When the railways of France, Germany and India were breaking down through age, it was the Americans who rebuilt them. When the Pennsylvia Railroad and the New Yourk Central went broke, nobody loaned them an old caboose. Both are still broke. I can name you 5,000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble.

Can you name me even one time when someone raced to the Americans in trouble? I don't think there was outside help evenduring the San Francisco earthquake.

Our neighbors have faced it alone and I am one Canadian who is damned tired of hearing them kicked around. They will come out of these problems with their flag high. And when they do, they are entitled to thumb their nose at the lands that are gloating over their present troubles.

I hope Canada is not one of these.

Stand proud, America.

Gordon Sinclair (June 1973)
March, 2007