On Sat, 04 Mar 2006 19:39:35 -0500 Lee Revell <rlrevell@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Sat, 2006-03-04 at 19:10 -0500, lanas wrote: > > I've lived in Europa for four years and there's more culture there > > than in America, that's one thing for sure. People in general like > > to know about things, they have interests, while in America only > > some do. > I don't know what part of America you live in, but there's TONS of > culture where I am. Maybe you didn't get into the city enough. Can't have tons of culture when the country is only 400 years old at most. There's no blame to be put: simply look at the facts. What can you expect as 'tons of culture' when your country is large as a continent, does not include other old countries (as Russia, China, etc...), that Native people (the only ones who lived there before) are rendered irrelevent, that your northern neighbour is mostly the same (apart from that little corner up there of 7 millions, you know, but even them, they're Americans, but with a slight cultural twist), and when all immigrants, despite their exotic names, adhere quite fast to the American way of life. So that's pretty much uniform. And this uniformity prevents people from facing 'tons of culture'. Can't really blame people for that. Now compare this to Europe. All these little sovereign 'countries', each having their own language (most of them). You cannot live in Europe on a daily basis for years without that feeling coming up. Be it in the news, the papers, that prompts you to think 'Hey, there are Italians down there close by and Parmalat has troubles and it implies Berlusconi. Hey, there are Finnish people up there close by (yes I know, takes 24 hour ship trip from Rosotck to get to Helsinki) and they're doing some good business with Nokia. etc...". So on so forth. Be it the music. Especially in the middle-to-small leagues, but also the big stars such as Zugaro whose posters fills up the streets ofa German city. When did you had the oppurtunity to last see the very good Swedish band Isildurs Bane ? Or The Flower Kings ? Well, you know, IB takes their rental truck and drive it down to Germany and then they can play a few gigs there. And the week after ? Two Finnish ladies singing Lapland songs. Lots of that per week, 52 weeks per year. Be it the films, rentals and in theatres. be it the car industry with cars from France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Czech republic (Skoda - I know, owned by VW), Sweden. So you see, there's no blame to be put on the dynamics where people are living. Put European people in America and after a generation or two they'll behave like... Americans ! ;-) As for the second point I mentioned, people having in general more interests in things, this is very flagrant with the percentage of Americans not caring what Bush has lead them to so far. Political chitchat in America often boils down to echoing something heard on TV. In Europe you at least get the feel that the individual has given some thought to the matter.
