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We’re number one in the least amount of federal and state government expenditure (as a percentage of GDP).

We’re number one in budget deficit (as a percentage of GDP).

We’re number one in daily per capita consumption of calories.

We’re number one in lowest voter turnout.

We’re number one in number of political parties represented in the lower or single house.

We’re number one in recorded rapes (by a factor of almost three times our nearest competitor—Canada).

We’re number one in injuries and deaths from road accidents (almost twice as many as runner-up Canada).

We’re number one in births to mothers under the age of twenty (again, more than twice as many as Canada, and nearly twice as many as number two New Zealand).

We’re number one in the number of international human rights treaties not signed.

We’re number one among countries in the United Nations with a legally constituted government to not ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

We’re number one in number of known executions of child offenders.

We’re number one in likelihood of children under the age of fifteen to die from gunfire.

We’re number one in likelihood of children under the age of fifteen to commit suicide with a gun.

We’re number one in lowest eighth-grade math scores.

We’re number one in becoming the first society in history in which the poorest group in the population are children.

Pause for a moment and reflect on that list. Doesn’t it make the heart swell with a sense of pride, knowing that we as Americans—and no one else—can get to the top in so many categories? Sorta makes you nostalgic for the days when East Germany won all the medals at the Olympics. This is no easy feat to pull off, folks. Give yourselves a pat on the back, and the rich another tax cut.

In the interest of trying to be more empathetic toward those in the other 191 nations on earth, I’d like to offer a few suggestions to help bring about world peace. I modestly call this “Mike’s

Comprehensive Peace Plan.” The way I look at it, we’re all stuck on this island, no one gets to claim immunity—and no one’s getting voted off any time soon. So whether it’s simply the right thing to do, or it’s because we don’t want to end up with a Bin Laden lurking in every airport in America, we need to help set some things right in the world.

I would begin in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, and North Korea.

THE HOLY LAND

Such a nice name—the Holy Land—for a place with more evil acts per square mile than the VIP room at Satan’s annual marshmallow roast.

In January of 1988, just one month after the beginning of the First Palestinian Intifada, a few friends and I traveled to Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza to see for ourselves what all the commotion was about.

Although in my life I had already traveled through Central America, China, Southeast Asia, and other parts of the Middle East, I wasn’t ready for what I saw in the refugee camps in the Occupied Territories. I had never encountered such squalor, debasement, and utter misery. To force human beings to live in these conditions—and do so at the barrel of a gun, for more than forty years—just made no sense.

I am deeply saddened and angered by the horror and misery the Jewish citizens of this earth have had to endure. No group has consistently seen more death and torture come their way than the Jews, at the hands of a bigotry that has lasted not just centuries but millennia.

What amazes me is not the nature of this hatred—after all, ethnic war seems a fact of life—but the consistency with which it has been passed down, for thousands of years. Hate isn’t like a

Grandfather clock or a gold watch; you can’t leave it behind for your next of kin. If my great-great-great-grandfather hated Canadians or Presbyterians, I would have absolutely no way of knowing about it. And yet somehow hatred of Jews has been passed down, like a language or a song or an oral tradition, among so many people. Usually we humans