Thursday, September 22, 2016

70% of Americans never had or will have a Passport

To Europeans for example, this would horrify them because going between countries is often something you do on a weekend trip for example, and mostly always have since World War II at least.

So, thinking about the people who have never traveled or will travel ever outside the country we find most of Trump's supporters who are clueless (in regard to personal experience at least) of how the rest of the world operates.

It doesn't help the U.S. to have this many (experientially clueless people) who might never now or ever have been to another area or state let alone to places like Mexico or Canada even that far. It's a real ethnocentric problem all over the world especially regarding uneducated people. These are the kinds of things that tend to start wars (not understanding other cultures at all).

Because no matter what anyone tells you about another culture you really know nothing until you have actually gone there and experienced it for yourself. Studying other nations or cultures is relatively useless without your own experiences included.

I can share with you how going to India, Nepal, and Thailand and Japan completely altered how I saw the world and how my older children saw the world ever after from December 1985 until April 1986. We came back what I would call "Citizens of the world" in reality because we became more than Americans during this time.

But, the most surprising thing to me was the culture shock of Japan, Thailand, Nepal or even India was not the most extreme thing we experienced. Rather the very worst culture shock was when we came home and realized just how cold Americans are the way they hide in their cars, homes, apartments and don't walk around and talk to each other very much.

You might see fist fights in other countries, you might see arguing in other countries but you also see people actually communicating more in person than you do here in the U.S.

This makes us (even though we are more educated in general than many countries) a much more ethnocentric country than we should really be.

However, then you have to see which cultures are the most ethnocentric on earth and they are:

Russia,
China,
and the U.S.

So, these three countries because of their extreme ethnocentrism are the most dangerous in this sense because all three have nuclear weapons in abundance trained on each other and other nations as well worldwide.

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