I grew up in such a town...only much smaller than Everett is now.  The military is gone and the base now a beautiful state park but the paper mill is still here...aggravating the clueless newcomers who "can't breathe!"

America does enormous good in the world, sending vast amounts of money and resources to help people in poor and developing countries. Still, there's no question that large, powerful nations also do great damage, and many of our policies need to be changed and actions rectified (cough, war for oil). But at least the public has the ability in this nation to manage our government and promote peaceful world coexistence. Almost every group of people, from families and tribes to countries, operates in its own self interest. When conflicts arise, the strongest, wealthiest and most resourceful tend to survive at the expense of others. Conflict and power imbalances are as old as time, and likely innate to humanity.

Even in our lifetimes, millions of people have been tortured and killed by leaders around the world who terrorize their own or nearby populations. In the last five hundred years, from Africa to Israel to Russia, the number of people oppressed, tortured, raped and killed is staggering. How about the savagery that came from the most eminently civilized Catholic Church in their terrorist mission to subdue and control populations? Surpassing the slaughter during the Crusades, the Catholic witch trials resulted in more than 20 million deaths, which far outrivals even the Nazi's Holocaust. For the entire middle ages (and up to modern times in Russia) the class system was enforced by terrorizing the lower classes. Care to guess how many heads have ended up on poles to scare the rest of the population into cooperating in the schemes to promote the rich and powerful at the expense of the rest of humanity?

How many present-day Americans have killed others, or are even descended from someone who killed native Americans?  Not many. As with slavery, historical conflicts don't necessarily reflect today's struggles, and painting an entire country as bad is often counterproductive to solving contemporary problems. It's just silly to blame all white people for the actions of a few slave owners who bought, sold and abused Africans brought to this country as slaves. Many Europeans and Americans are descendents of slaves or serfs who were raped, tortured and terrorized by an aristocracy with the same skin color as ours. And what about the white Americans whose ancestors fought for emancipation? Are they also "bad Americans" simply because their skin color matches that of other people who did wrong?