A mind is a terrible thing to waste

[The Barry]

I think that this is a natural side effect of living in large country--I'd like to have someone pluck a Chinese man or woman out of the center of the rural countryside and poll them on their knowledge of European cultures and accents and see how well they fare. And yet it is always the Americans who are held to the impossible standard.

Wow--I guess this is a button for me. Sorry for the rant, but I feel much better having gotten this off my chest.

I don't want to stir up trouble, but I believe that the real problem has a lot more to do with our complacency than our geography. People depict Americans as bumbling idiots because we travel the world expecting people to bow down to our wishes. I've traveled much of the US and Europe and I can attest first-hand to the arrogance and ignorance of my fellow countrymen.

Stupidity and ignorance are everywhere. But we don't have an excuse for it here in the states, we live in a country where education can be had by all. But we're just too damned comfortable and isolated to give two cents about other cultures. The "plucked" person from China doesn't have access to the freedom of information and learning that we do. There's no parallel there.

[/rant]

[ali8780]

I don't want to stir up trouble, but I believe that the real problem has a lot more to do with our complacency than our geography. People depict Americans as bumbling idiots because we travel the world expecting people to bow down to our wishes. I've traveled much of the US and Europe and I can attest first-hand to the arrogance and ignorance of my fellow countrymen.

Stupidity and ignorance are everywhere. But we don't have an excuse for it here in the states, we live in a country where education can be had by all. But we're just too damned comfortable and isolated to give two cents about other cultures. The "plucked" person from China doesn't have access to the freedom of information and learning that we do. There's no parallel there.

[/rant]

Look, I understand that there are people in the US that act and feel this way, but it's the generalizations that bother me. Why is it never assumed that most of US citizens do care about other people of the world and want to be sensitive to their situations? Just because a handful of the more obnoxious ones travel around?

I don't consider myself a special circumstance, I grew up in a medium sized community in the middle of the rural US where I spent almost the entirety of my life and gained an average public school education. My mother was a Farmer's daughter and grew up in a town who's population could all gather together for a night under one building, and my Father was the son of a blue collar steel worker who never saw more than a radius of 30 miles around him for his whole life until recently, and yet I have never assumed that the US=world or that other cultures didn't matter. I've always tried to be sensitive to other people, especially while traveling in their countries--why is it so ridiculous to assume that there are more people like me out there?