So I was in the bar a couple of Fridays ago, and talking with 2 of my colleagues, who shall remain nameless. We were discussing current events and one of them said "I don't really watch the news". I kind of didn't believe him - thought he was trying to give off an air of cynicism ("maybe he only reads blogs, or maybe he is addicted to NPR"). But no, I found out today he was being absolutely truthful, as he asked me what was going on in Iran that he'd seen something about while passing by a news stand.I proceeded to give him a 5-minute summary of the events of the last weeks events, skilfully (or so I thought, smugly) relating them to US foreign policy and the overthrow of the government by the CIA in the 1950s, and pointing out that because of Twitter and YouTube, both American inventions, that the revolution was not televised, but digitised. He seemed to appreciate that I was so keen to share my knowledge of the situation with him, but I also got the impression that he really didn't care, that he couldn't even see the dots that could be joined between this distant land and his own life working as a consulting engineer in the big city.
For him, hailing from the MidWest and working in the Big Apple, life is probably daunting enough without worrying about some innocent protestors being murdered on the street by their own police for protesting at an obviously rigged election in a pseudo-democratic dictatorship, with legitimate grievances against his nation. This is the same guy who didn't vote for Obama, not because he didn't think he was the better candidate, but because Obama was a shoo-in in both NY and Michigan, and he didn't think that adding his vote to the many others to bestow as great a mandate as possible was worth taking 4 hours out of his day.
But I'm not here to condemn, only to diagnose. We Europeans have a sterotypical view of the US as insular self-obsessed people, who too often fail to see or care about the consequences of their actions on others, or come to terms with the possibility that American exceptionalism is not just born of entrepreneurial initiative and their blessed constitution (written by rich, slave-holding male land owners, and so perfect it has been amended umpteen times), but due to the fact this resource rich land was stolen from its native population, and worked by unpaid slaves for hundreds of years to gain its wealth.
So of course, the truth is somewhere inbetween what we think of them, and what they think of themselves. This is a country where a mixed-race man can become president, but also a country where a supreme court justice nominee with more judicial experience than anyone else can be labelled a racist for expressing the opinion that her poor upbringing and experience as a Latina woman could give her a different (better?) perspective than an old white male born into money.
I don't think you can blame people for not wanting to know about other countries if their upbringing and education has never related their own nation's history to other places on the globe. This is simultaneously a strength and a weakness.
So what is my point here? If you don't bother to investigate someone else's motives for doing something, then you will never understand why they act the way they do, or why they think what they do about you. If this works for you then cool, carry on your own way, my dear cousins. But you'll be missing out on something special.
Ah that was cheesy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6IQxhkVIEw
