One of the challenges in USA culture is that we are increasingly becoming a culture in which we, “casually [say] ‘I’m gonna live my life the way I want to.'” However, the reality is that such a thought is impossible regardless of how commonly it is expressed in modern USA culture. Why do I say that?
If you think it through, you will realize that it is impossible to live our life the way you want to without running into other people’s right to live their life the same way. Or, another way to phrase it is that if you wish to live your life without considering others, you will inevitably trample on other people’s right to live their life without considering you.
Let us consider some non-challenging examples. Traffic lights are installed for the common good. Should you decide to ignore traffic lights, then sooner or later you will end up causing an accident which may result in the death or injury of some of those involved in the accident. In this case, your willingness to live life the way you want to causes more harm than good.
Let me give you another example. You are a motorcyclist who does not believe in helmet laws. You get into an accident in which you suffer a preventable head injury. You will expect to be taken to a hospital to be treated, even if you cannot afford it. Provided you survive, you would complain and even sue should the hospital not have exerted its full medical ability toward the goal of healing you. You expect to have zero personal responsibility for engaging in a behavior, failing to wear a helmet, which leads to an injury that would have been easily preventable.
Ignoring societal conventions has been trendy since the youth of my baby boomer years. But, I am older now. I realize that we were playing at what we did not know. The reality is that we were objecting to some purely arbitrary societal conventions. But in our depths, we fully agreed with our elders that societal conventions, such as taking care of all who are injured, were still important to us. In fact, many societal conventions were still important to us. We took (and take) the Bill of Rights for granted. We take the XIVth Amendment for granted. The very structure that permitted our misbehavior and our mistaken behavior was taken for granted.
It is time that we acknowledge that, as members of the USA, we all assume a certain set of societal conventions that actually permit our misbehavior toward those very conventions. Whether we are politically conservative or politically liberal, we assume and behave as though those societal conventions were set in stone. It is only when we move to other countries that we are faced with the reality that many societal conventions are limited to just our society.
The reason for the dislike of American tourists overseas is based largely on our inability to flex to meet the societal conventions of other cultures. Thus, we will argue at the gates of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome that it is wrong to prevent us from entering in shorts and with bare shoulders. We are incapable of recognizing that what is not important in our culture is important in another culture. It may perhaps be important for us to recognize that perhaps our culture has some inappropriate values when it comes to honoring important places. Or, to be more neutral, it is clearly important that when we are visiting another culture, our appropriate dress values may require us to change our standard mode of dress as USA citizens.
But, I think there is a stronger point that can be made. Our multiple decade emphasis on pure individualism (masquerading as libertarianism) has led to a pushy me-oriented attitude that makes us unable to compromise with our neighbor in order to foment societal peace. That insistence on our viewpoint, widely documented on Facebook, leads to behavior that is anti-social and even illegal while attempting to claim the right of self-determination. It is no wonder that the “OK Boomer” tag has become so popular. The mistake in the tag is that it is not just the Boomers who are so behaving, but rather almost all modern USA citizens.
The New Year is almost here. It would be wise to make the commitment next year to be more community-oriented and less individual-oriented. Otherwise, I foresee the growth in YouTube videos of Americans misbehaving and unable to perceive their gross mistakes.
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