Dear Shmoopy, I belong to one of 'those' countries. We do not have deaths by gunfire every two minutes is it? We do not have as many rapes, with a population much, much higher than yours. Education situation is bad, but steadily improving (before the colonising of our nation, we even had priestesses, never heard of that in many of the enlightened nations). The economy was destroyed by constant invasion from the West and we are now a 'third world country'.
Sexual freedom in our country was supressed by 'Medieval Western Morality'. We have had the nuclear option for 20+ years, but we have declared a no first-use policy. We share our foodstocks with countries that are poorer than us, break bread with our enemies.
We did make some mistakes by meddling in Sri Lanka's affairs in the early eighties but after burning our fingers once, never repeated it.
I do not use much gas, oil, CFC's as much as countries with tenth our population, but have to suffer the brunt of the climatic changes due to pollution.
And we respond to our leaders' decisions in the most blatant way possible, voting them in or out of power. We question them and analyse each and everyone of their decisions.
We have around 20 religions in our countries, 32 languages and over a 150 dialects.
There are occassional hiccups but we carry on, thank you.
