I’ve been working away from home in a small Montana town. It’s a big project for my big company, so people come from all over the US to work here. Most of the people are big city folks and mostly from the East. I’ve always felt a little less sophisticated and less culturally aware than people from big cities. A little clunky and a little ignorant, I suppose. The big cities have all this culture and art and fancy things. I appreciate and love my simpler upbringing and quieter life, but I recognize the drawbacks and what I’m missing out on.
My big city counterparts here, well, they’ve surprised me. Mostly people I generally enjoy, but I’m suprised how ignorant and intolerant they are of different cultures within their own country and their own race. The life here is different than big cities and it’s different than a lot of small towns. It is profoundly different from the small southern Arizona town I spent my first 16 years and still more hardcore than the next small Western Colorado town I lived in. Things like the fact that hunting is not mere hobby, or merely a way to attain meat, but is rather a way of life kinda freaks these people out. So, long story short, I’ve heard a lot of ignorant stuff this week. This however, takes the cake. I was at a party last night with my co-workers and I was getting to know a big city girl. We’d gone through the ‘where ya froms’ and all that, and in conversation, I mentioned my husband. She asked me how old I was and I told her I was 26.
“Oh, how long have you been married?” She asked
“Coming up on 2 years in August,” I smiled.
“Oh wow, 24?! So young… I guess that’s just what you do out here, though,” she said, like I was a sad case of arranged marriage and perhaps I’d also had a sexual organ ritually altered.
I tried to explain that, actually, I married for love, not out of social or cultural obligation. Also, what the fuck, bitch?! (Heh. No, actually I was very polite.) I am so lucky that I met such a fantastic man when I was only 21. It surprised me, actually, that I married so young (not that I really married all that young). But when you find a man like that, who you feel like that about, and he feels the same about you? You roll with it.
I was relating the incident to my husband, who is (much) more worldly than myself, but doesn’t have a superiority complex about it, over the phone today. He said, “Well, most big cities have a Little Italy, or a ChinaTown, but there’s no Little Butte or RedneckTown. They probably understand people from other countries better than you do, but they don’t get a lot of the people in their own country.”
I guess the conclusion I came to is that, unless you’ve lived pretty much everywhere, we all have deficiencies in what we should know about the other cultures. The hope is that your Mama and Pop taught you some modicum of politeness and humility and that you need not exert your percieved superiority over other cultures. If you are in a discussion with someone from a culture you don’t understand, ask polite questions, or maybe, just shut your damn mouth and keep your idiotic stereotypes.
Dumbasses come from every culture on Earth. I guess that’s what unites us.
When did getting married at 24 become “so young”? When exactly are you supposed to get married if you have found someone you want to spend the rest of your life with? I think that girl is funny. I grew up in Seattle. A city that is the home of millions of people from everywhere. I met my soon-to-be husband when I was 16. Yes. 16. We have been together coming up on 10 years. We are getting married in October. Would she have the guts to tell me that, “I guess that’s just what you do out here, though”? I am thinking not.
I always knew you Seattle-folk were a little backwards.
I think 24 seems “so young” to people who were “so young” when they were 24! KnowwhaddImean? Though there is undeniably a good part of that population who just plain jumped the gun, I think most people who found their spouses young are a combination of lucky and smart to recognize and hold on to a good thing.