by Sandman » Sat Sep 01, 2012 2:03 pm
Again, travel the world, Dharma bum. One of the most jarring epiphanies I had being abroad, especially all across the middle east, was that moment where you're like, oh.........we really aren't ”basically all the same” and only separated by language. Culture is a deep ravine that is sometimes impossible to bridge, and the truth is most of our limited little fun pop-cultural peeks at other world cultures that we get in the west are even more sanitized and westernized for our consumption than we already know. IMHO, the opposite of cosmopolitanism isn't xenophobia.......it's realism. You don't have to be afraid of other cultures or think them inferior to admit that they are different and deeply incompatible.