Do you think Americans would have a better grasp of the world if they traveled...

pdooma

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...to a developing country? I grew up overseas in a number of developing countries. And I always wondered how the US would be different if every American had to travel and live in a developing country for a month before they could graduate high school. Not remotely possible, I know. How do you think it would change the mindset of the average American?

Have you traveled outside of your home country?
 
Ive been to many countries and I think that is a good idea, Its very common for people to travel abroad for chairty works that come from the south, being that it is very christian.
 
Since liberals are succeeding in turning THIS into a third-world country, why would we need to travel anywhere?
 
People could get broader view the world if they traveled abroad, not necessarily to just developing countries. Have traveled to to about 17 different countries, many of them developing, and it has broadened my horizons.
 
My dad was career Air Force, in electronics, and our family lived in Koeur la Petit, France during the 1950s when Eisenhauer was U.S. president and Charles DeGaulle was president of France. Before our family of eight (six kids) left for France, Pop had us older kids read the book, "The Ugly American," so we wouldn't behave with arrogance or holier-than-thou attitudes---a book many Americans might benefit from reading even today. We lived 45 kilometers away from Toules Rogiers AFB in a big stone house that Pop had found for us the year before we all moved there, and we just loved that little village. The first week, our Russian neighbor threw a dead rat in our stone gutter along the narrow road to protest "Les Americans"---my mother kept sweeping with the broom made of tree limbs and simply had my brother wrap the political-commentary, lol, in newspaper to discard and then smiled at the woman standing at her window and waved a "good morning." When our family left several years later, this woman and her family stood alongside the road with all the other villagers who lined the village streets, weeping that our family was leaving, and each sharing some treasure from their home to take with us on our journey back to les Etat Unis. We learned so very much about other cultures from our time in France, which leads me to answering a most definite YES to your question. The ones, especially, who have adopted a "me, mine" selfishness would perhaps benefit most from living among people like the Haitians, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere now completely devastated by the 8.8-magnitude earthquake and all the aftershocks, whose people join together in their makeshift cloth lean-to "villages" surrounded by debris and knowing of the burials of hundreds of thousands of their fellow Haitians, sharing what little food they may have and at sunset gathering in groups to sing songs of strength and uplifting joy. Or in Darfur, where people starve to death each day...So many of our ill-tempered people would be strengthened by witnessing the incredible courage and the "count my many blessings" attitudes among those living in abject poverty so far below the absolute worst any American teabagger or anti-government militia member has ever known, making do with what little they have, sharing with strangers who have even less...All these angry egocentrics shouting "government overthrow" need to meet up with people who are enduring tremendous hardships, but who have found what joy they can with so much less than all the many blessings routinely taken for granted by American malcontents.
 
no white person in american could survive one day outside the us of racism

real people work for what they got. it's not handed to us!
 
I have traveled abroad and see very few southerners.

I met many Californians, Ohioans, and New Yorkers, but the only southerners I met we're from Kentucky and running drugs out of Amsterdam.

I think it would help, there is such a distaste for Europe like it is a hole, but it is quite nice and just as modern.

I've been to Mexico, and other parts of Latin America as well. Makes me think of Che fighting to end poverty and failing at it. Americans might have more compassion if they saw it.
 
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