Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Why don't they just apply math?
Another Bruin opinion. This one from applied math major Lara Loewenstein. The complaint? Not enough Americans go away.
Americans have often been accused of being insular and narrow-minded. It doesn't help that with 8.8 million passports issued in 2004, at most only 30 percent of Americans have one. In other words, 70 percent of Americans don't feel a need to leave the confines of their home country.
How about some applied statistics. It's even more than that. I keep a passport, but I don't plan on leaving this country for anything other than business. How about some information on proportion of Americans who visit other countries? That seems a bit more relevant.
This seems a little ridiculous when the United States is one of the richest countries in the world...
No, it makes sense. We've got stuff here. Why should we want to leave? "Hey, poor people!" That's not my idea of a vacation.
Experiencing other cultures firsthand is a form of education that can't be achieved through books and studying. While seeing the ocean gives one a sense of infinity, experiencing other cultures opens one's mind and heart.
Ooh, now there's the applied mathematics. Ocean = infinity. Anyway, experiencing other cultures firsthand is a form of education that we can do without. We won't even try with books and studying.
People seem to forget that tolerance is a learned attribute achieved by challenging oneself to tolerate.
Others forget that most of us don't really care how tolerant you think we are. As long as we're comfortable in our hearts, why make a fuss over who's more tolerant than who?
By not traveling, Americans are sending a message to the rest of the world that other cultures aren't worth our time or effort.
Yep, that's about right. Hey, don't be sad, rest of the world. We've already got a culture. It's nothing personal.
America has an image. That image is in desperate need of repair. One way of ameliorating this image is to make our presence known abroad.
Because every country wants to be overrun by American tourists. Hey, those Iraqis sure know of our presence.
It's surprising that so few Americans don't want to rediscover their heritage by traveling to wherever their ancestors came from. While we are all American, we are also so much more. By traveling, each of us can rediscover our personal histories, open our eyes to different cultures, open our minds to different people and enlighten other people to the truth about Americans.
Hmmm. Interesting. Personal histories, eh? Let's see. I was born in America. So, my personal history doesn't extend to Iran. There's no heritage to rediscover over there. I already have a culture, I don't really need another one. Are you people really so unimpressed by the culture you create around yourself that you have to supplement it? Is your imagination so pathetic that you need some coincidentally related dead people to bolster your identity? Geez, people, put your brain in charge for once, and stop demanding that the world do all the work for you.
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