Here's the original post as it appeared at reddit. Enjoy.
America is a really strange combination of people who almost all came from different places. You'll find that while most "native born Americans" will identify with being American first, there is a very strong desire to explain where your people came from -- even those of us who have been here the longest haven't been here more than a couple hundred years. Your country most likely has buildings that are hundreds if not thousands of years older than our family histories of being American. This also means that we don't have a very good grasp on history or what "a long time ago" really means. Everything's relatively new here.
You might ask why I didn't bother to mention our true native population. It's because all the people who came to this country did a very effective job of wiping them out and moving the ones left behind to less desirable areas of the country. Unless you're at a casino (typically only found on the land we gave them when we moved them), it will be rare to find a Native American, and even rarer to find two in the same room.
You'll find that because of all this, the "culture" of America is dumbed down, a bland mix of everything from every other culture in the world. It will likely be highly offensive to your culture, because every bit of nuance will be removed and only enough essence will remain that you will be able to recognize how your culture has been bastardized. Not only that, some of the "America" will be baked right in on top of it all and only you will be able to see that most of what everyone likes about your culture is really not your culture at all and instead what America thinks your culture is. You'll hate it. You'll write long blog posts about it. You won't be able to stop mentioning how terrible America is for co-opting your culture and destroying it at the same time.
However, you'll be unable to resist American culture. The problem is, just as it has dumbed down your culture and made it palatable to outsiders, it has done this to every other culture as well. For those cultures that you don't know quite so well, it seems to unlock a world that was formerly inaccessible and unknowable to you. You'll love it because it makes you feel like you know more than you do and that you've had richer and more varied experiences than you've actually had. This is what we do, and we do it very, very well: we take what's great about everything, distill it down into a bland facsimile of the original, and then sell it back to you at a markup.
I'm not proud of this fact, but it is what happens when your culture is new, comes from everywhere, and no one has a real concept of shared experience. Think of us as the nouveau riche of culture. We're simply not old enough to know better.
Also, you're probably going to have a problem with distance. This country is huge. Like really, fuckoff huge. Like "might kill you if you miscalculate how far it is to get somewhere". You are not going to visit New York, then drive to Los Angeles in a week's time. You might be lucky to do the drive itself in a week -- it's about 4500 kilometers and will take about 40 hours of driving. Those maps will look like things are just "right over there", but they are not. Your scale is wrong and you're used to looking at different maps. Don't underestimate this on your travels, it can take a long damn time to get anywhere in this country.
Also, while we don't have the variation of language and culture that say, Europe has, different areas of the country are distinctly different. You can't just visit New York and say you've seen America. Visit New York and Los Angeles, and you're getting closer, but you'd really need to also visit small towns out in the middle of nowhere with names that only the people that live there know, and you'd have to visit places like Dallas and Miami and Seattle and Denver and New Orleans and Alaska and Hawaii and ... well, everywhere. I've lived here 39 years and there's still areas of the country I haven't been to and still areas of the country that surprise me when I visit. It's impossible to "know" America, because it means so many different things to so many different people.
This great expanse means that we're isolated too. It's very hard for Americans to visit and explore other countries. I live within a three mile hour car ride to Mexico, and that's considered close to the border. Of course, three hours by car doesn't take you to any town you'd actually want to visit in Mexico. To get somewhere like Mexico City is going to probably take a plane trip, which is prohibitively expensive for many families. Canada is the only other close neighbor we have that's relatively easy to visit, and it's got the same problems of being very remote from most US cities coupled with the fact that it's really just America-lite. Until a few years ago, you didn't need a passport to visit either country, which is why the majority of Americans don't have a passport. Any other country is a long plane ride away and will cost over $1000 US per person just to get there. Most families really can't justify the money, especially when there's so much to see right here.
That also contributes to the fact that we're not aware of what's going on in other countries. We've never been, we don't know anyone who lives there, and generally speaking, what happens in your country doesn't really affect us here. We know that you know all about us though. Unfortunately, our outsized media, market, and military presence means that we affect just about every other country on Earth in some way. You will feel that we don't respect you because you know so much about us and we know comparatively little about you.
Unfortunately, we will feel that there's so many of you and we simply can't be expected to know every little detail about every little country. We'll also feel that you never really take the time to understand us and you greatly misunderstand us. This is primarily because your exposure to us will either be through our media or our military. Unfortunately, our military doesn't normally recruit our best and brightest and curious and humble for the people you're most likely to meet.
Our media generally gets nothing right. Remember, we're all about selling cultural experiences to people who are ignorant about that culture. That means that regardless of whether it's your country, your job, or your passion, they're going to sell you something that looks like what the ignorant thinks it looks like. That also includes our country. Baywatch is not even remotely typical of what you'd find on a Los Angeles beach, but it is what people in middle America think you'd find on a Los Angeles beach. Likewise, it's what you think you'll find. Even our news is sensationalized and can be better called "News Entertainment". If you come to visit, you'll be pleasantly surprised to find the country to be nothing like how you thought it would be.
Oh, and for a mixture of races, cultures, and nationalities, we don't speak many languages. We had to default long ago to something everyone could speak, and for many reasons, that language became English. You really do have to speak it to get around in this country, and it's just expected that you'll speak it, so you learn it. Unfortunately, there's no good excuse to learn another language. If you live close to Mexico, and you work with manual labor, you'll find Spanish pretty useful and you'll probably pick up at least a working vocabulary, though probably not a conversational capacity. If you don't work these kinds of jobs, or don't have the good fortune to be born into a family with strong ties to their original country, there's no obvious second language to learn and little opportunity to use it. A lot of people attempt to pick up another language, but with no one to speak it to, the skills atrophy pretty quickly and the motivation to learn more quickly wanes.
We're raised on a culture of exceptionalism, so you'll find us to be a bit full of ourselves. However, we also oddly want everyone to like us, so you'll also find the average American to be quite friendly and genuinely curious about you. We're raised to believe that any of us can do anything, and while that's not entirely true, it's an extremely powerful ideal. You'll need hard work and a whole lot of luck, but it is possible to claw your family from abject poverty to impressive wealth in a single generation. It's expected that you'll start your own business. It's expected that you'll fail. It's also expected that you'll pick yourself up and try again. And again. And again until you make it. Failure doesn't have the stigma here that it has in other countries. That frees you up to take chances and do something great as opposed to plodding along in mediocrity. Unfortunately, all of these things also make us a little insensitive to those who cannot find their way. In our collective mind, they're failures not because they tried and didn't succeed, or because they didn't have a chance, but because they didn't work hard enough to overcome their adversities.
I don't really know where to end this, it's already too long and I could keep writing all day, simply because America isn't a simple concept that can be easily explained. I just wanted something a little better than the stereotypical "AMERICA FUCK YEAH."
The part about language is spot on.
ReplyDeleteIt's farther from New York City to Denver (one language the whole way) than it is from Paris to Moscow (5 languages: French, German, Czech, Polish, Russian