The Ugly American

As WordPress continues to recycle old prompts, I pulled another prompt from The Coffee Monsterz Co to respond to today

What stereotype about your country (or state, province, city) is true, and what stereotype is false?

There is a stereotype about Americans. You may have heard the phrase “the ugly American” according to the stereotype, Americans are self-centered, and entitled.

Typically, when the ugly American travels abroad, they’re not going to bother learning the native language of whatever country they’re traveling to. They’ll get mad and not understand why everybody there doesn’t speak English (which is ironic because now I do most people overseas speaking English, they often speak better English than Americans do). The ugly American stereotype is, for the most part, true. Americans are arrogant and self-centered and entitled.

Usually, the ugly American also assumes that the American way is not the best way, but the only way. The ugly American tends to look at the government framework, the penal system, healthcare, education, the culture, of other countries and believes them to be backwards. The ugly American usually forgets that other countries of the world have lasted hundreds, if not, thousands of years longer than United States. Finally, the ugly American fails to realize that there are things lessons that we, as Americans, can learn from the history of other countries.

And don’t even get me started about these stereotypical Trump supporter.

But not all of is

As for a false stereotype, thankfully, not all of us are The Ugly American. I think there’s a great number of us – maybe even a majority – who are compassionate, and open-minded. We are ready to embrace new ideas, new ideologies, new culture, new foods, a lot of us understand that not only does much of the world not function like the United States, but l also that that’s okay.

I think of somebody to like Anthony Bourdain, and his old TV show parts unknown. Personally, I wasn’t a fan of the show. I didn’t really know a whole lot about the man until after he died. But I like the fact that in all his travels and all the different cultures that he encountered, all the different, political, ideologies, etc., he centered his entire show much of his professional life around the nearly universal concept of communal dining.

Bourdain realized that when we strip away all of the excess furnishings of modern society, we are all humans and we have a great deal more in common than we realize; like the need to eat, and the desire to eat and the need to socialize.

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