American Culture Today

In today's America, it is strongly frowned upon when someone complains in any way shape or form about their American life. The typical response to such complaints are made in an attempt to ignore the complaint or to change the mind of the complainer. One is “oh grow up and toughen up. Your grandparents hiked 6 miles up a hill in the snow to get an education. You are so lucky. Children in Africa are starving...” you get the idea.

Or, the psychological response...

Oh try this new hand cream, go shopping, pamper yourself, or join a volunteer program, clean your house, change your hair, take more vitamins, go to a shrink, take pills, etc.

The average American's solution to overwork is more work. No rest.

This does not make much sense.

Perhaps it is because the U.S. Is a product of a Protestant work ethic and a special set of Religious beliefs which are imbedded in our culture today?

Why we ask, are citizens non responsive to politics?

Perhaps because they feel that it is wrong or a sign of laziness or weakness to complain?

We seem to have fully made fun of Emo kids these days, and forgotten about them in pop culture, but we never heard them out, we didn't care to take their messages seriously.

When do we take anything counter cultural seriously?

The reason is simple: we live in a culture that values fatigue over rest

anxiety over happiness, and violence over peace.

I've noticed there are hardly places to sit down in public, outside, especially.

Nothing is very pleasant for sitting... and if you are sitting on a bench, you are stared at by everyone passing by, considered lazy, or something of that sort. No one really speaks to you... you hardly get a nod or a smile.

Our society values us when we are working and wants to shun us when we are not.

Even our parents treat their children the same way. I'll kick you out of the house if you don't find a job in X amount of time. Why the rush, moms? Are you afraid your son or daughter will “never amount to anything?”

According to whose standards? And the kids still in the parents basement smoking pot... what are the parents doing in the mean time? Not spending wholesome, real time with their kids, reaching their kids, playing with their kids, etc. The parents and children of today's America exist in separate worlds, function in compartmentalized frames, parallel universes known as: “kids school, mom and dad's work, dad's car, mom's cell, my friends, her purse, his wallet, her friends, his friends”...

To Americans, the fact that we all HAVE cell phones, wallets, car keys, take regular showers... is a sign that we are being 'good citizens', 'good parents, good kids'. We have to prove ourselves day in and day out.

Alas, there is no sense of real community: the organic, natural kind, like befriending your kids, your neighbor, the old lady down the street, smiling and being kind to random faces you run into every day... this isn't taught to us or considered vital or important at all. We measure how friendly/kind we are by things like social networks or clubs or work buddies. In other words, our expectations for society to be involved are superficial or are rigid, stationary models, like a Victorian corset a woman used to wear. No one can seem to find a solution, or try to find one, maybe because no one sees a need and is courageous enough to find a solution.

Also:

We teach our children how to be good people as long as they are in the neat little boxes of the system. What about outside those boxes? When no one is looking, what kind of people are we? We care far too much about what society thinks of us... perhaps it is because we are afraid that if we do not follow these social norms we will be shunned by others, or worse, fail in life and at life.

Consider the Resume':

A person spends their life purposefully doing specific actions in a certain manner in order to write it on a piece of paper which will be reviewed at some point in time by a group of people who that person has never met and might not ever meet.

Consider the kinds of actions we Americans consider worthy of our time:

Volunteering is a HUGE one. What ever happened to doing good things because you want to? And besides, this isn't church! Why the emphasis on piety in secular culture? Isn't this strange? Odd? Out of place that we value volunteer work?

What if what I consider to be a noble action is merely something simple like listening to my professors and really trying to understand them,

or taking out my neighbors trash for them, or giving money to a homeless person and having a conversation with them, etc. etc. Maybe even just sitting in my room writing a poem! Maybe telling a joke! Maybe I don't like conforming to some arbitrary societal gauge of what is right or wrong when our society is secular, humanistic and denies the existence of God....

Perhaps I hate the way modern society is today.

Because it is a big joke... and everyone knows this joke and says, just be a good boy or girl and just play along. Don't ask questions. Do what you're told.

Will someone explain the huge desire among many people today for a complete separation of church and state, while no one even bothers to ask the extent of the religious impact of the recent past on American society? With no questions asked? No one's educating our kids showing them how much we've been influenced culturally by religion in the past.

No, we are too proud to admit in our secular world that at one point in time, we all attended church and practiced reading John Calvin. We are too lazy to get out of our comfortable BOXES and question the legitimacy of our country's values, beliefs, standards, and ways of living and being...

we are far too accepting.

Don't judge too harshly.