Forum Post: Cultural Differences Cause Conflicts

http://occupywallst.org/forum/us-policy-to-israel-palestine-must-change-by-by-ji/#comment-1079466

The U.S. has the settle-the-frontier pioneer gun culture. Anyone who misunderstands it is liable of being shot. As a young new driver crossing into a new state, I didn't understand this culture when I was stopped. I was extremely surprised that the police officer was totally/utterly stressed out by my scrounging all around in my car looking for its registration card which he had asked me to get him. Don't end up as yet another Breonna Taylor ! All lives matter--understand ( especially "blue-life" ) culture. I'm glad that I wasn't dark-skin-colored !

Another caution is that don't go to other people's places unless they've been informed beforehand and have approved of the visit. Uptight people may simply shoot and kill other people who trespass onto their private properties. Breonna Taylor's friend who shot at the raiding plainclothes police was acting in accordance with this unspoken custom in certain uptight neighborhoods where armed robberies were common. It matters very much where one lives, the color of one's skin, the reputation of one's racial group, etc. The darker skin colors generally fare worse. One should observe boundaries: such as crossing over to the other side of the proverbial "railroad track", to the other side of the park, across an abrupt change in gradient or geographical features such as up a hill, down a precipice, beyond a stand of bushes, hedges, trees, or fences, across a stream, a pond, etc. Time's boundaries are also important. A perfectly safe place during daytime can become very dangerous once the sun has set. ( I, for example, seldom { do choose your friends wisely, for they can entice you to break your own rules ! -- I've done somewhat stupid/unprincipled things by not refusing them to visit Central Park after sundown, though not deeply into the park; once I nearly drank to excess because friends were buying me several "Russian" drinks to celebrate--there were "Black Russian" but also "White Russian" ! Hahaha ;) :) ;) I wonder if there are now "Yellow Russian," "Orange Russian," or "Brown Russian" drinks, too, considering that Jesus Christ ( whose first miracle was the turning of water into fine wine for a wedding banquet ) condoned alcohol ( but condemned it in excess ) and commanded for remembrance moderate drinking in Christianity's rituals so Vladimir the First chose Russia's state religion to be Orthodox Christianity instead of Islam; my Mom was Christ-like in her attitude about alcohol because she had made her own red wine for the worship rituals of my spiritual godfather and ancestors and offered me and my Big Brother each a tiny cup for a taste as she said that her father had offered her the same when she was a five-year-old child sitting at his dining table; everyone in our family, with the possible exception of the patriarchs < Dad was only once coming home drunken from a celebration >, turned out to be very light drinkers of alcohol } stayed in any park after sunset or went there before sunrise.) It's best if one has one or more knowledgeable longtime local resident(s) as guide(s). I was thus acculturated when I first arrived in "glitzy" Manhattan and led to visit the various parks and landmarks, taught to ride the subway, etc.

Before my arrival in America ( in Manhattan borough of New York, N.Y. ), I had no experience with healthcare/medical-care insurance or automobile insurance and registration at all. I visited the Hong Kong government-run clinics and hospitals for all Western-medical needs ( at very low prices--I figured once that Dad could work one day and use his wage to pay for staying in the hospital for ten days,) including eye examinations and eyeglasses/spectacles care training but not the purchase of the physical eyeglasses. The public healthcare service functioned much as an additional [knowledgeable opthalmologist and optometrist, non-optician] parent/guardian/advocate/consultant who prescribed and recommended purchases of eyeglasses but didn't get involved in the buying process itself which was referred to private optical companies. I liked my Big-Mommy, largely non-intrusive "state" in Hong Kong because of my nearly illiterate parents being unable to guide or help me with life experience. The government-provided options might not be the best but often good enough for most ordinary people so there was a coziness allowing laziness not to spend much effort "shopping around." My Mom, for example, whenever a permission sheet with a to-be-returned approval slip came from school asking for a signature to approve my childhood vaccination, simply approved the free vaccination without much fuss at all. On vaccination day, the class was lined up to go though a pipeline ( which is the most efficient form of parallel processing relative to the minimal resources required at the stages; U.S. assembly [pipe]line mass production won WWII.) The school personnel kept track of the vaccination records so with compulsory elementary/primary education, the schools know well the minimum vaccination rate they have achieved. Has herd immunity been achieved?--just ask the schools for an estimate. I saw mobile vaccination clinic vans near my shantytown in the leased territories where their people gave out sugar cubes with a drop of red [¿polio?] vaccine to the neighborhood children so there was British Colonial outreach project to boost vaccination rates, too, amongst the "non-Chinese Chinese" refugee neighborhoods. It's why I believe the British Colonial government didn't count on "British immunity." The U.S. didn't learn the very hard lesson that "American [White/class] immunity" is nonexistent to germs so the U.S. consciousness was about where the Colonial British were nearly 100 years ago so U.S. denizens had died like flies in this pandemic. Being infected by a European strain of SARS-CoV2 from Italy rather than the Wuhan strain wasn't any more pleasant !

In Hong Kong, I had excellent public ( there were almost always buses standing by just outside of the shantytown where we lived although they did tend to become very crammed sometimes--my sense of personal space was thereby very much abridged because of the cheek-to-jowl packing in with total strangers on buses, in the markets, etc; the people of the U.S. have a more expanded sense of personal space than mine, especially so for the more rural or older folk because population density was so much lower in U.S. rural areas and in the old days than either New York or Hong Kong; one way to tell who may be more highly sensitized is the proverbial wrinkled "redneck;" another group with heightened sense of entitlement and grievance against the world is what I would call "the black widows" who are usually older angry-or-sad-looking White women with an attitude often dressed up in black tight-fitting leotard-like tank tops exposing much but not great-looking skin, sporting dark sunglasses; excessive sunlight exposure is detrimental to skin by making them "age faster;" women who live in higher latitudes tend to have younger-looking skin but be at risk of vitamin-D deficiency or depression; another group of people which I would call "the black pearls" often having excellent skin even in advanced old age is the extremely dark-skinned people who got the protection of melanin ), private transportation, and was a long-distance hiker in a rather small urban area so I could just walk to places since I had learnt orienteering.

Before I became an adult in the U.S.A., I didn't drive. I usually just hung on to my Big Brother's waist { sometimes for my dear life on "that pocket rocket" } while sitting upon his motorcycle's backseat. He told me why he had bought a motorcycle--his girlfriend(s) had to hug him tightly to hang on [also for their dear lives at times]. I suspect that his two-seater served as his convenient excuse for not carrying me, his "license to roam," on his dates. The motorcycle turned out to be very useful in traffic jams because it could squeeze slowly through in between the stuck cars.

I neither dealt with insurance nor any taxes. My parents had NEVER even talked of or fussed about Hong Kong taxes--of course, while lacking tax hassles, it was easier for us to be apolitical there { I'm glad that Hong Kong had the Happy Valley and tea to keep the British Colonial élite occupied; their connections worldwide were invaluable to Hong Kong. For Fuck's sake, the Beijing élite rather than getting all uptight and political should get equally fun-loving as the British to uphold the suzerainty of Hong Kong Vaginal Line, the impregnable resistance workers of which were so effective during WWII keeping the Imperial Japanese troops so busily occupyingly occupied with catching syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, UTI, etc. Despite the suspicion of and/or concern about post-WWII-Yokosuka's U.S. aircraft carrier's sailors being incel or going raw, the U.S. Military did that better during the Occupation of Japan, with condom rations issued to the troops for the sex-related part of humans' needs for food and sex rations.} I suspect that the [native] customers of a Hong Kong business didn't notice the taxes levied upon the businesses because the businesses had already figured the taxes and included them in the purchase prices. The ordinary workers such as my parents didn't file any tax-return forms--life was vastly simpler in Hong Kong for the ordinary average working-class folk. Our Hong Kong business-folk neighbors did fuss with taxes but hey, they wanted BUSYness for certain !