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.