I love the country I was born in and I love the country in which I'm living currently. Here, there isn't that strange American sense of being a Lone Ranger, a self-made man/woman, an INDIVIDUAL at all costs. There really is community here - is it perfect? No. Is it wonderful to watch people interact? Yes. Family is paramount here - young adults live with their parents, usually, until they marry - and if they divorce, they move back in! (Mostly this is the fault of the economy, which makes it almost impossible to live alone here.) Older people are respected,for the most part - that's lovely. Kids are treated like kids and not extensions of their parents or little adults - mostly. People are kind to one another - when we lived near the edge of our city, we had a lovely house and a beautiful yard - and a HUGE electric bill - none of our local friends could understand why our bill was so high - finally, our landlady,who had been paying the bill, explained that she just couldn't cover it anymore, so she lowered the rent and had us pay the bill. Finally, one of our friends thought to check the electric meter - and it was spinning around really fast. He had me turn off everything in the house - I unplugged the fridge, the stove, the toaster - everything. The meter was still spinning like crazy - and our upstairs neighbor's wasn't moving at all! Now, the upstairs neighbor was our landlord's brother. You can only imagine what might have happened in the States - but the landlord and landlady went and talked to the brother, who apologized. The landlady and I went over the electric bills and we agreed on a sum that we shouldn't have paid and she reimbursed us - and she kept the rent lower by way of apology. They both continued to treat the brother with kindness and love - he wasn't some renegade that they had to cope with - he was a brother who was going through a hard time and hadn't felt that he could talk to his brother about it - and he thought the brother was paying the bill. He had no idea that we were paying it. As far as I know, this wasn't a pattern since they were as shocked as we were - but even though they were angry, they talked with him gently, accepted his apology, resolved the issue with us, and continue to love him. He is, after all, family.
Now, I'm not extrapolating that out to having to accept Nbehavior from NFOO's. No, I'm not. But I think that sometimes Americans are TOO all about their rights and their anger and their revenge and not enough about real community, where you accept that people make mistakes periodically and you don't have to demonize them for it. You can talk to them gently about it, forgive them if they apologize, and go on loving them, knowing that when you act the fool, they'll remember and forgive you as well. And you certainly don't have to round up a posse and go after them, hunt them down and annihilate them!
Did I say that I like it here?
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