Day 234 (Part One): Xenophobia*

As I travel the world more and live in Madrid for an extended period of time, people suddenly seem to be much more alike than I ever thought, yet, at the same time, far more different from each other than I ever imagined. You can go out for a beer with them and talk about life and really connect, and then they can look at your feet and exclaim in horror, "Oh my god, you're wearing FLIP FLOPS?!" and suddenly it's like you never met.

Intrinsically, I feel that everyone wants to be happy and loved and fulfilled, but the outwards expression of that and way of going about those things are incredibly different from person to person and culture to culture. And sometimes the differences can be so hard to comprehend that they just seem "backwards" and plain "wrong."

I cannot count on my fingers and toes the number of times I've heard my American friends here bashing the Spanish for cultural differences they've witnessed. Their doctors are incompetent, the old ladies are bitchy, the children are unruly, service is impersonal, everyone is too loud, etc. etc. And that's highly educated Americans studying for their Master's degree here, in a Western country whose values and lifestyle are really not half as different from 98% of other countries in the world.

And it's not one sided. I had to read a batch of high school senior essays last week about America's violent gun culture and how barbaric and selfish we all are. They made up fact after fact to support their preconceived notions about a country half of them have never even set foot in.

So the fact that one man got on the bandwagon of America Hating after becoming disillusioned with his own experience in the country is not in the least bit shocking to me. Half the American students in my program who came here to avoid aspects of their lives back home and hoping for a good time here are literally counting the days until they can return home to "people like themselves," and surely never plan on returning here again. To think of what kind of life they'd have here if they were unable to return home for whatever reason... Scary.

But imagine if they had, on top of their interminable list of cultural differences that angered them, Spain had been in a war of a country where their religious and political ideals were prevalent... Man, things would really get ugly.