Something to chew on and possibly spit out.

I know... I know... Everybody thinks they are special, unique and different from everybody else, and in fact they are all right. A few believe no one truly understands them and they also may be right. But this entry just happens to be all about me. And today I feel like talking about what I believe makes me so different. But first of all I would like to clarify a few things. When I say that I am different, I do not mean that I am special and certainly not that I am better or worse than anybody else. I simply believe that me and many other people in this world, due to many factors that I will elucidate further on, ended up growing to be well... a different type of people. For the sake of this entry I will call these people I am trying to describe as "aberrants". Aberrants and the extent of their differences from other people depend on two factors. One is external and the other is internal. First let’s talk about the external factors. Cultural influences on people can sometimes be very subtle. Most of the time it is hard to point out to people what these are, because everybody believes that what they do and how they think is normal or even "the right way" just because everybody around them does it too. Geography has a way of creating its own dynamic through the converging of the majorities' thoughts and actions while excluding that of minority. One finds himself obliged to either conform or be marginalized as someone having aberrant habits and ideas. People who grew up in many different cultures, embraced many different philosophical and religious influences simply have no choice but to either repress or abandon certain cultural habits they picked up in their lifetime, or live with the fact that they may be viewed as odd by their new neighbors. Well at least in America they do. Now I'm not saying that everyone in America is insensitive to people's cultural or ideological differences; After all I am an American (Born and kind of raised). But you gotta admit; too many Americans find it difficult to appreciate a genuine import from another country. Why else do we have to Americanize everything we borrow from other cultures before we can consume them? Foreign merchants are so aware of this that they attempt to Americanize many of their cultural products in order for it to appeal to us. Of course there is the exception of art; which is valued for its exotic and cultural qualities. Anyhow sticking to the subject at hand, my intention here is to shed to light on the fact that as much as the contrary is advertised, we are less apt to accept differences than we like to admit. And by using imports from other countries as an example I hope I have not reduced this tendency of ours to merely applying to that specific case. My concern is that we also approach ideological differences, and worse matters of taste with this attitude. I guess our fragile psyches do not like our fallacy of omniscience to be shaken by the possibility that someone else may be actually doing things “the better way”. Because when we view things as either right or wrong, black or white, we end up worrying whether the alternative is actually better. But isn’t possible that we all are right?

Not quite sure where i was going with this post but I’m posting it anyway.