Thomas,
sorry, if I was misunderstood in my statement, you cited.
It was never ment as "bashing" Americans. Just a statement of fact, you also
confirmed. Now the Great Plains, with no boarders
(since US bought the Louisiana Teritory from Napoleaon)
are easy to travel in any direction, no fighting, no wars,
mayby some crime, but ceratinly much less, than in huge metropolis
of the West or East coast.
For over a century nobody was killed in a war activity on the North American
continent. This is what I meant in comparing your point of view,
living in Michigan, and mine, living in Poland. Almost everybody in the parents
generation of my family was involved in war, my mother spending time in
Nazi concentration camp, and my father in Soviet gulag.
This makes a difference in attitude to history. I am not evaluating attitudes,
I am just stating a fact.
As I wrote already before, also my cousins in LA have no clue of the history
of Europe, although their father (my uncle) also spent 2 years in a gulag in Siberia,
was fighting in the Battle of Britain and was not able to return to his home country
beacause of the Communist regime. Their mother was British, so they got just
a little clue of the UK history, but (I assume) more as a part and background
of the US history, than anytning else.
Regarding translators and languages. Of course an internet translator is better
than nothing, certainly opening a lot of new opportunities.
But I think you miss the clue. We can communicate now on this forum, not
because of the translator, but because Peter and me learned English,
and it's good so. In middle ages there were also more or less no "national"
boarders in Europe, but the most important thing was, there was Latin,
"Lingua Franca", a common language of all nations, at least educated people
across Europe.
If we like it or not, English language is developing to a modern "Lingua Franca".
It is already a universal language of science and technology, in spite of all the
efforts the French are making to stop this trend. (It is sometimes rediculous,
when the whole world is using words "computer" and "program" and they
still insist on "ordinateur" and "logiciel".)
So I think, you are in much more lucky situation, than we are. Your mother
language is spoken by more and more people around the world, and even if
you don't know any languages, you will have more and more chance to learn
other people and other countries.
The social structure. I am biologist an geneticist, and what you say about the
social structure of Native Americans is still very true until now, for biological
reasons.
It has been proven scientificaly, that human brain can memorize and recognize
not more than 150 human faces. In our airplanes we have now moderd "FoF"
(Frien or Foe) system, but this inherited ability to recognize faces was the
ancient FoF system for the humans. Knowing all the 50 members of your clan,
and most of the 100 potential enemies was a question of survival.
But above this direct recognition of individual faces, there were inherited fears
of general cathegory of humans, looking generally different than the members
of your tribe (clan). Big or small eyes, noses, color of skin or hair, was the reason
to discriminate FoF. Unfortunately, this inherited subconcious mechanism is still
very active in human brains. We are still a stone age tribe dressed up in suits.
We still tend to hold to 50 of our look-alikes, or people we know, and reject
everybody looking (speaking, dressed) differently, for no rational reason.
The ability to follow such a conversation, like ours, over the continents,
using a common language is the only way to get over all this prejudice
and atavistic fears.
I am getting academic here (I used to teach at an university for many years),
so forgive me, but again, I am far from puting labels on people or nations...
Paul
BTW: What I miss in the forum editor, is a "spell-check"...
So frogive me my spelling mistakes... P.