Hollywood, major league sports, the music industry and tech, as long as a complicated history have made most of the culture of the US fairly well known.
This is a reply to the prompt What is strange about my home country?
I’m interested in hearing what other people think. I imagine the hardest thing for people from other countries to understand is our elections...
Don’t they resemble a sports tournament?
People are shouting and commentating the very same way they do about sports. Everyone wants their team to win and treats the other side like an enemy. Everyone chooses the two popular teams, many people in other countries don’t know that we have other parties because the big two are so powerful.
The debates are crazy, right? These people go out and tear each other apart only to hire each other and shake hands a few weeks later. Look at Biden and Harris. Or Bush and Obama. Or even Clinton and Trump, they were buddies before the election.
The thing that boggles my mind the most is how so many people focus on the presidential elections and how little people care about their local politics or their neighborhood and the culture they promote. People think that it doesn’t matter if they treat their neighbors like inconvenient strangers and yet voting matters.
The way I see it, if you can’t trust your neighbor, you are always going to have terrible politicians and it won’t matter much which one wins because they will always use scapegoats and try to use division to manipulate. If the people are united and build trust through their daily interactions, it is far more difficult for politicians to get away with lies and BA because there are so fewer distractions.
I don’t know if any country really has nice or clean politics but the level of delusion Americans have about their politics and this idea that we are “the greatest democracy on earth” seems a little funny to me when half of Europe and Asia all have aspects that they do better than us, and we support many corrupt leaders in Southern Hemisphere so that they can’t improve, I think it’s rather ironic to even compare.
In any case, I think the human race is wising up and starting to understand the value of a decentralized but connected approach. We can see how we have more in common with regular people across the world than we have in common with the people who make the important decisions, and we are becoming more able to take care of ourselves, less reliant on the enforcement of laws, and more experimental, and so I have a positive outlook for the future, despite all the dangers humanity may face. I think the negative impacts of globalization are more apparent now, but as individuals begin to catch up and find new ways to connect that organizations cannot, we will see a new kind of inter connectivity which is much more positive than when it’s just done for business purposes. We are seeing it on this platform too!
And in this community all are welcome to mix and match their culture or create their own, and connect however they feel comfortable.
We will figure it all out somehow.
What do you think is strange about USA?
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