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Originally Posted by Ledgem
Good points. That raises another interesting facet: in person we naturally gravitate to people who match us in some way, and the default for a long time was age.
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Man is a tribal creature. We stuck to people like us, our tribe, because that helped ensure our survival. It is an evolutionary trait we haven't grown out of yet. This works better in most other countries, because they are generally all of one kind of descent. America has issues, because we have so many different types of people, from all over the world. Despite how we might say we are all Americans, we still inwardly have issues with other races or cultures, mingling with ours.
*That* is the source of racism. I can sometimes feel a discomfort around people who aren't like me, but I recognize where it comes from now, and now it doesn't make me a racist. It means I am suffering from an evolutionary trait that, while it made sense when we were a simple hunter-gatherer species, it doesn't make sense now. Even then, I barely feel it most of the time, but sadly, many are still locked into the "tribal sense" and thus feel compelled to attack people not like themselves; not just race or culture, but class, too.
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This gets back to an issue that was discussed a few pages ago. A lot of us Americans think that we're #1 in the world in just about everything. That pride makes external criticism seem warped. If we are #1 then we are undeserving of any criticism, especially from those who don't live here; any negative sentiments must be blind hatred, jealousy, or trolling. But just as nobody is perfect, there is no perfect nation. Whether we're the closest to perfection or not is a matter of opinion, but we should certainly be able to listen to criticism and consider it honestly, without our pride getting in the way.
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This is probably our biggest problem. Our politicians, in order to get elected, have fallen over themselves telling us what a great people we are, and what great things we can do for the world. And that has ended up blinding a lot of Americans into thinking we can do no wrong. Sure, a politician might screw up here and there, but we're still America, the greatest nation on the face of the planet! Our constitution is perfect and needs no change, and we don't need to do anything differently!
It makes it really damn hard for those Americans like me, who want to correct actual problems that are getting people killed. But we can't, because the problem can't be that our constitution needs changing, or that our way of life is wrong. The problem is just other people. This has the side of effect of allowing us NOT to change, because we don't like change. We generally prefer the status quo... until something happens to us, ie, we love our guns... until we or our kids are gunned down, and then we realize the folly of our earlier position. You simply cannot get someone to understand your point of view, until they've lived it. Just like a rich person will never understand what it is like to be poor and how to address the problem, until they are poor themselves.