The United States is the most hated country in the world.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

90. Wouldn't go quite that far, BUT...

until I had lived overseas, I didn't really know how insulated Americans are from the realities of the world, although I got a hint of it when my family took a 5-week trip to Europe to visit relatives in 1967.

Until the new passport laws of 2007, only 11% of Americans had a passport, and we are one of the few countries in the industrialized world (perhaps the only one) where a person can graduate from high school, and sometimes even from college, without ever studying a foreign language.

I got more international news in Tokyo's English-language newspapers (none of which are journalistic masterpieces, but they do serve a highly diverse group of expatriates from all over the world) than I did in most American newspapers.

When the Soviets went into Afghanistan in December 1979, when I was already back in the States, I was the only person in my circle of friends who knew that 1) Afghanistan had had a Marxist revolution in March 1978, and 2) that government had called in the Soviets to get rid of the precursors of the Taliban, who objecting with violence to the new government's plans to institute secular education and equal rights for women.

If you're getting all your information from the American media, you are uninformed or at least, misinformed.