There are differences between your culture and the cultures of a half a dozen people who live in your neighborhood.  Often you never witness anything more than a slight accent or a deeper olive or brown tint in the complexion or, perhaps, the way the hair is coiffed. 

Most of the time such differences melt away and nothing reminds you that the neighbor may have fleetingly seemed not like you and that they grew up in a different cultural setting – sometimes disturbingly different from your own. Several people who are more like me than others possess a culture where they believe they should not vote because “it won’t make a difference”.  They disturb me greatly but I won’t go to war about it.

Many times you can through life without ever hearing or seeing something that shocks you into outspoken opposition to a difference that you ordinarily wouldn’t even bat an eye about if it occurred thousands of miles away. What would your reaction be if the shocking thing happened in your neighborhood? How would you react when existing norms shaping the boundaries of your mental comfort level if the differences would be pictured in sharp contrast and would you or should you become agitated about it?

In other words, what would it take to get you to do something about it?  I hear complaints daily about piggish habits of careless individuals.  I see dangerous driving on my way on the highway and even in our little courtyard where cars are driven through at high speed and abandon, sometimes with muffler cut outs roaring to announce the arrival of some “youthful spirit”.  What does it take to get me to go down into the parking area and put up a sign on the habitual careless or ignorant person who parked dangerously or unlawfully that he will be towed if it happens again?  How many times must this cultural outlaw do what he does to outrage me before I do have him towed?

Does the outrage that happens thousands of miles away from you or the one that is in your own backyard get you agitated?  I would venture to guess that you couldn’t care less and would say LEAVE ME ALONE!  This was expressed in a sign defaced by someone in our condominium as LEAVE US ALONE! when the sign merely stated that garbage left on the laundry room floor should be correctly disposed of.

There is a cultural behavior of brutality when a man feels he can beat a woman who may or may not be his wife or there is a gratuitous murder of innocent bystanders in a drive-by shooting. These never get as much attention as the absurd mental processes of rural Pakistani elders who punish a man’s crime by decreeing his sister must be raped by a posse they appoint.

None of the cultures that differ from our middle class sensibilities have had the same education in free schools and taught a history that exhibits liberal and progressive support of government free of religious influences nor have they had a sense of responsibility ingrained by your culture or my culture.

But yet – it seems that there are Middle America “born again” representatives who support our President in his selection of “secretaries” who want to take away individual freedoms in the spirit of totalitarian regimes elsewhere historically or even in present day America. Yes, even in America, cultures collide.