America the INFLUENCE + Thoughts

Week 10

One of the things that living abroad has made known to me is the enormous influence that the United States exerts on the world. The strong American influence that is present is opening my eyes to just how much I don't know about my own country. It is making me aware of knowledge that I am lacking regarding our politics, culture, and metropolitan areas; moreover, it is making me think twice about the information that I call "knowledge."

We would be surprised if we could somehow visual see how fast verbal information is passed from one person to the next. I caught myself in the act the other day: a friend of mine in my German class told me how she tried a hand at studying Finnish and said that it is one of the hardest language to learn. It has 27 cases instead of prepositions. That afternoon in another one of my classes we somehow got into a deep conversation about linguistics. Someone brought up Finnish and I blurted, "Oh my goodness, that's such a hard language! C'mon - there's 27 cases. And some think German is hard ..."
Have I ever seen, let alone studied, the Finnish language in my life? I doubt it.
This is no extreme case, and happens more frequently with topics that interest us. America happens to belong to a topic that interests the world.

I am studying at an American university in Vienna where many of the students come from eastern European countries. The textbooks and other scholastic material are often from the U.S. There is a significant number of study abroad students each semester from the U.S., myself included. Conversations regarding politics and culture are far from minimal, and to be knowledgeable about one's country is a great responsibility and a necessity. It is not enough to have isolated but fervent opinions on this and that, to have a itty bit of information about one or two things, to know about the small things only. As I wrote a few weeks back, what people "know" about the U.S. will come from what we as American students have to say about it.

Topics such as consumer society, George W. Bush, educational system, the wars in the Middle East, social welfare, and public transport are commonly debated and heated issues. I've heard so many American students concentrate on one aspect of these topics that he or she agrees/disagrees with and suddenly apply it to the entire American society. Take for example a discussion on consumer society. You will hear, "Well, in America, there's so many shopping malls and everybody uses their credit cards and that's why we're in this financial crisis. Nobody saves their money anymore..." Such statements come from either a sense that other countries do not have such problems, a lack of knowledge, in this case, on economic trends, etc, a removal from the problems discussed, or all three.

Some things that I am becoming more and more aware of as I hear such conversations is: 1) opinions are not facts, 2) an acknowledgment that we don't know something is far better than sounding like we know it, 3) what we say will get passed on, so credibility is important, and 4) being critical of something does not necessarily indicate disagreement.

Other thoughts

The most pressing examples that have been on my mind for quite sometime, and which I promised to write more about are first, a great frustration and gripping sadness with the current state of affairs; and second, a search for the delicate balance between "imitation on the assumption that that is accepted" and still holding out "resistance to being 'the status quo'"

State of Affairs and the Status Quo

Each day is a challenge. I finally feel like I am becoming accustomed to living in Vienna, but there is also a certain despair that I feel when analyzing the current state of the world and my generation's response to it.

Something that my Spring Break trip pointed out to me was just how the same everybody is. I've never felt anything like it in my entire life, and I will attempt to explain it here.

The relationship between me and the world that I grew up in has always been "outside looking in." I grew up in a rather impoverished neighborhood in St. Louis, was not brought up by my parents, barely knew most of my brothers and sisters, was familiar with financial and emotional hardship, could scale a fence before I turned 11, considered fights a weekly event, lost family members in drive-by shootings, cringed at the smell of alcohol and marijuana, and had an imagination capable of seeing myself in college but incapable of seeing myself ever having what is commonly known as "the good life." In 2001 I moved to one of the nicer suburbs in St. Louis, where the majority of kids my age were from well-off and hardworking families, knew that they had 5 siblings instead of having to guess, got Christmas presents from family members instead of the Salvation Army, and saw college as an obligation rather than a choice. it was the most important event of my life, and also the most challenging.

Every day is a challenge...

The problem now is that the struggles that have molded me into who I am, that have given me a larger window of understanding, are no longer present. I began the slow and tedious attempt to leave the past behind; first, by seizing the opportunity to move off to another neighborhood, where as mentioned before, the hardship is barely visible. Then, through the 'integration process' more roots are dug up - I worked so that my speech would be transformed to the proper English that is spoken presumably by successful young men and women; I learned to silently battle my way through and stay at the top in academics, sports, arts, music as well as forge other talents through the most difficult means possible (teaching myself piano for 2 years in the absence of lessons, becoming almost fluent in a language that is not my own in less than 4 years, picking up the ancient art of calligraphy over the course of a summer, memorizing books of the Bible in a weeks' time); I began to shun ideas about mediocrity, thinking, "I don't have the room to be mediocre! I have to choose an extremely hard path in order for the path to be valid."

The question remains: why do it the hardest way when an easy way is readily available? My answer: the struggles that have shaped me are no longer present in my everyday surroundings. The only way I know how to succeed is by silently battling my way through, by struggle. So even if the path to success were to be cleared of all rubble, twigs, and stones, I would beg -

"Put boulders the size of SUV's in the way! Put thorns on every essential tree, hide lions and tigers and bears in the brush, and put the food that keeps me alive in their possession so that I will have to get through them first before the food is mine! Cover the heavens with clouds and midst and don't allow the sun to show until I have reached the clearing at the end of the path"

I write these things not to get a "Wow - look at her..." response from my world, but instead to evoke a self-confidence, a courage, and a determination that says "What the heck am I doing? Perhaps another less travelled path would be harder, and with it the risk of failure, but maybe I can give it a try..."