You know this and it is still all but impossible to achieve, particularly here where you are distracted at first so completely by the mesmerizing otherworldly look of the place.

Just this morning shortly after six I observed a miles-wide plate of clouds, washed red on the flat underside by the rising sun and balanced on a spit of cotton that appeared to coil up from the depths of a shimmering sea—a sea that triangularly glistened varieties of red fanning forward from the fulcrum cloud’s foot to the distant shores that welcomed the sea’s ageless return. The mountain beside which the sun rose appeared purple on its shadow face, a deep green toward the coming day. The vista was animated by the swaying palm fronds of slender coconut trees that clustered in small sandy bays along a pristine coastline. This is St. Kitts.

The early first-century Christian authors of the Gnostic Gospels must have seen a place like this while developing the philosophical conviction that God indeed was in us and everywhere around us. For how else could such matchless natural beauty be possible?

The artist Georgia O’Keeffe lamented the modern human’s compromised ability to see natural beauty and thus be spiritually renovated by it. Rendered insensible by steel girders and concrete- surround, what chance have the eyes of the soul to rest upon a bird-of-paradise blossom on a verdant hillside? But here still on this tiny Caribbean island where there is a surviving sanity of scale, where the quaint wood and stone-face buildings decline to dwarf their makers, where traffic is directed by a person and not a machine, where on narrow streets the rules of vehicular behavior are recited solicitously to drivers by every man, woman, and child afoot, here I think, yes, in a small place like this, the soul, the spirit, has a fighting chance.

Of course what size chance may depend on the gravity of one’s wounds. America is a big place. Everything about it is big. It has big buildings, big streets, big guns, big money, big power, big hubris, big wounds. Everything about America is big except its people, who, unbeknownst to most Americans, are mere human beings, no bigger or smaller than human beings any place else in the world. They only look smaller, or behave smaller, because they come from a country where everything else, besides them, is so lethally big, so crudely antagonistic to the naked human’s social requirement.

Recently at the Ocean Terrace Inn, an American white father was heard saying over dinner to his family and forty-nine fellow dinner guests, waiters, and a maître d’ that he “couldn’t wait to get out of St. Kitts and back to Trenton.”

Trenton?

It seemed not to matter to the unhappy American that he had offended the maître d’, all of the waiters, and most of the dinner guests on racial grounds alone. He was an American with big hubris. He had noticed in his short stay that the weather was “nice.” He had not noticed, except as backdrop, the people of the country—least of all, apparently, those bringing him his food— and he would return to Trenton without knowing what a bird-of-paradise was.

Both the personality type and its ideas are an American commonplace abroad, oozing like a contagion throughout a resort-mad world, replicating resentment toward America by a factor of what? Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty percent of white Americans who vacation in the black and brown world? There is no way to answer this. The evidence is anecdotal. But ask any cab driver in the long lines that begin to form throughout the Caribbean at 5:00 a.m. at the deepwater ports on cruise-ship days.

Make no mistake, the people who live here and elsewhere along the archipelago of the eastern Caribbean very much want American economic partnership. No island economy can afford to be cut adrift by so powerful a regional neighbor. The governments of these islands have met every reasonable test for friendship. They all rank high in the global community of civilly well-run democracies. They all score high marks in the areas of human rights, literacy, health care, and general quality of life. They are all well-disposed toward the United States.

Why then have America and Americans behaved so callously toward governments and peoples who present them with no threat but only proffers of friendship? Perhaps Americans, or more specifically, white Americans, have behaved such because they only really value or respect what they either crave or fear: money or might, all else to be belittled, disdained, dismissed, even desecrated. Could it be that in America, the unexcelled bigness of all things material has resulted in the concomitant relative smallness of all values nonmaterial? Moribund ethics. The death of the spirit. An unexamined and withering national soul. The commercialization of everything from school to pew.

I am not suggesting that most Americans behave abroad like the white father from Trenton. He not only was possessed of a malignant purpose, but of an absence of manners to cloak his boorishness, as well. Most white Americans in their dealings with black, brown, and all other varieties of nonwhite people are altogether well-mannered and are often all the more damaging for it. For indeed fine manners and America’s national opiate of choice, chauvinistic narcissism, combine to immunize white Americans en masse from self-knowledge, self-doubt, self-criticism. If they don’t like us, it is only because they are jealous of us.

So cut off are most white Americans from self-knowledge, that one could publicly present a typical example of American high-office churlishness aimed at a foreign black head-of-state without causing so much as a ripple in the American press, while the same insult aimed at, say, a clerk of the exchequer of Liechtenstein, would result in windy umbrage taken in a rumble across the American body politic.

Dr. Denzil Douglas is the prime minister of the two-island nation of St. Christopher and Nevis (known more widely as St. Kitts-Nevis). Dr. Douglas, a medical doctor by training, is black, as are the vast majority of the forty-five thousand citizens of his stable democratic country, which is located not terribly far east of two islands that are better known to Americans: St. Thomas and St. Croix. Dr. Douglas (who heads the island’s Labor Party) and leaders of the opposition party, the People’s Action Movement, have agreed, if on little else, that the small economy of the country must be diversified away from a reliance on sugar production, which lately has been losing money due to falling prices across the world. Thus, efforts have been undertaken on St. Kitts and other Caribbean islands to expand the tourism and offshore banking sections of their economies, the latter of the two efforts frustrated significantly by the United States.

It was in this connection that an official of Ross University, an offshore American veterinary school operating in St. Kitts with a virtually all-white American faculty and students, sought to arrange a meeting in the United States between Dr. Douglas and Congressman Curt Weldon, a Republican from Pennsylvania. It was during this meeting, after listening to Dr. Douglas discuss what he thought was the sole item on the agenda, that Congressman Weldon proposed what he thought Dr. Douglas’ tiny country might do for the United States.

Contemporaneous with the meeting between Dr. Douglas and Congressman Weldon, all hell had broken out on Vieques, an island parcel of Puerto Rico, a possession of the United States. The United States has been using parts of Vieques as a test site for American military weapons. Our boys bomb it, shoot it, pulverize it. Blow it up to watch its dust dance hither and yon on the poisoned wind. As a result, Puerto Ricans living in the vicinity of the tests have over the years developed cancer at an alarming rate. Massive protests, joined in by prominent U.S. mainlanders, were begun on Vieques calling upon the U.S. Navy to end its bombardment of the island.

Congressman Weldon thought the Navy might be forced to move its operations to another venue. This realization caused him to invite Prime Minister Douglas to consider allowing the United States to bomb his beautiful, peaceful, stable little island nation. Our boys had to play with their ordnance somewhere.

No regional small-country leader can afford to brand a proposal from a U.S. congressman as stupid, no matter how absurd the proposed idea. Congressman Weldon had spoken, as Republicans are wont to speak, with no trace of irony. Prime Minister Douglas had little choice but to say that his government would take under advisement the congressman’s politely rendered proposal to destroy his country. It should surprise no one that Congressman Weldon’s proposal, gotten wind of by the local press, provoked quite a tempest on the island and died aborning. Not a line about any of this appeared anywhere in the American press.

Many, if not most, Americans will read this and no doubt sigh a “what’s the big deal, and where is this place you’re talking about, anyhow?” As a practical matter maybe it wouldn’t be such a big deal, were not such coarse little bricks being hurled willy-nilly across the world daily by brainless, insensate white Americans, high and low, numbering in the thousands. And no, I have not suffered an inexplicable lapse of language judgment. I use the words brainless and insensate advisedly, if perhaps somewhat desperately. White people around the world insult black people, brown people, everyone-but-them people, regularly and gratuitously, without even the bitter, dubious flattery of conscious intent. From overbearing congressmen, to wide-eyed cruise line steerage, to fuzzy-cheeked Ross veterinary students who someho...