Writing

Why do people write?

In my own life I began writing because I was an only child to try to make sense of the world. Adults seemed (often in another world) than the one I lived in as a child. So, because I was intelligent like my father and intuitive like my mother and Grandmother I found myself inherently different in my experience of life than either my mother, my father or my grandmother which is likely normal.

But, being an only child I wanted answers to all my many many questions yesterday or as soon as possible.

Also, in the 1950s when I grew up if you wanted to know something and your parents didn't know the answer, you got on your bicycle and rode it to the library several miles away and then asked the librarian where the Encyclopedias were and you looked up what you wanted to know about.

This was true until a door to door encyclopedia salesman working his way through college sold us a set of the "American People's encyclopedia' which lived in our house with us for about 20 years after that. (likely from 1958 when I was 10 to when I was 30 or so) when my parents retired to the house my father and I and my mother and friends built on weekends between 1968 and 1980 when they retired to the high deserts of yucca Mesa above Yucca Valley, California.

Now, you can do the same thing by going online with your smartphone, laptop or desktop computer or even tablet as long as you have access to wifi or with your smartphone cellular data at a good enough rate at the location you are presently on earth.

But, when I was growing up there weren't as many people with college degrees as now or billions of cell phones and smartphones to use as research tools sometimes instantly to retrieve information of all kinds all over the world.

So, there was a lot of misinformation then or racist information that you might not have even known was racist at the time.

For example, I recounted to a friend something I read as a child and didn't know it was racist at the time which was in a newspaper comics section on a Sunday. It went something like this:

Three Native south American  Indians in South America were standing on the edge of a cliff there and one fell off and fell to his death and the other two died laughing.

Having been a teenage boy I could see how this could happen to younger men because of they way they are psychologically at that time in their lives. However, when I told this story to my friend the other day he said that was racist against Native North, South, and Central American Indians.

So, I had to rethink this one memory of the 1950s in a different context than before.

I likely have thousands of memories intact from the 1950s like this still that I haven't thought about much since then either. So, basically if you were white growing up in the 1950s you were exposed to a lot of racist thoughts whether you wanted to be or not just watching TV for example, and most of this was so very very subtle you might never recognize it for what it was even today.

It's true that some things are blatantly racist but not many even then.

So, I would say that the very subtle racism today is the most dangerous of all worldwide.

and the worst of this is Ethnocentrism of which China, Russia and the U.S. are the most guilty of as cultures on earth, which also makes these three countries the most likely to go to war with neighbors because of this blatant ethnocentrism.

eth·no·cen·trism

ˌeTHnōˈsentrizəm/

noun

1. evaluation of other cultures according to preconceptions originating in the standards and customs of one's own culture.

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Translations, word origin, and more definitions

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Ethnocentrism | Define Ethnocentrism at Dictionary.com

www.dictionary.com/browse/ethnocentrism

ethnocentrism. [eth-noh-sen-triz-uh m] Sociology. the belief in the inherent superiority of one's own ethnic group or culture. a tendency to view alien groups or cultures from the perspective of one's own.

Ethnocentrism - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocentrism

Ethnocentrism is judging another culture solely by the values and standards of one's own culture.Ethnocentric individuals judge other groups relative to their own ethnic group or culture, especially with concern for language, behavior, customs, and religion.

‎Origins of the concept · ‎Anthropology · ‎Cultural relativism · ‎Causes

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