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Comment on I'm am myself and myself is bad at fitting in

MudMan@fedia.io ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Hey, you may be shocked by this idea, but sometimes people live in places where they weren't born for a while.

But also, even if they didn't, it turns out you can't exist in the world, let alone the Internet, without being constantly exposed to an absolute firehose of US-generated media, including all those very specific references. And, by extension, we also have to be concerned about you weirdos not messing up without having any agency on the outcomes of your bizarre political system (so don't mess it up for us this November, thanks in advance).

That's the entire impetus of my intervention in this thread, the ongoing frustration of seeing Americans, both on the left and the right, be constantly convinced that everything everywhere works just like it does around them and that nobody has thought about it or come up with different solutions or had different needs elsewhere.

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sparkle@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Hey, you may be shocked by this idea, but sometimes people live in places where they weren’t born for a while.

That… would make you American. I’m confused on how you think you can live and work in America for a long period of time while participating in the culture and not be American…

Regardless, you definitely could have gone through a different country’s education system, so how about I ask this: Which continent was it on? Out of, say, North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania.

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- MudMan@fedia.io ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Holy crap, does that have strong "shit Americans say" Reddit energy. The friends I have who actually wanted to live in the US had to worry about getting a green card for a decade, but I apparently qualified for a passport after week two. I mean, I never wanted to move there permanently, even when offered, but it's good to know it would have been that easy.
  
  Aaanyway, if you wanted to reveal my place of origin you probably could, given how you're fond of digging through my post history. Go see if you can put together the clues. Or don't, because if I did want to share that I would have at this point, don't you think?
  
  Turns out that I don't feel like passing whatever litmus test for "foreignness" you may have, my hopefully accidentally exceptionalist friend. The fact that you're not seeing how this entire line of questioning is getting very weird is definitely making my point and should absolutely give you pause.
  
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  - sparkle@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    Aaanyway, if you wanted to reveal my place of origin you probably could, given how you’re fond of digging through my post history. Go see if you can put together the clues. Or don’t, because if I did want to share that I would have at this point, don’t you think?
    
    I asked for the continent. So basically what you’re saying is that you’re North American.
    
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    MudMan@fedia.io ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I had genuinely never struggled to convince somebody I'm not American, this is amazing.
    
    Specifically American, too, because in your scenario being British or Irish wouldn't have worked. I'm slightly relieved that you at least considered Australia eventually.
    
    OK, how about this, I'll give you a little bit. I shouldn't because screw you, you don't have a right to my life history, let alone to evaluate my cultural background against your arbitrary weird anglocentric preconceptions, but this is too fascinating to drop now.
    
    So when I went to school our system was very into integration. I went to the same classroom as kids who had Down syndrome and cerebral palsy until I was maybe eleven, twelve? I genuinely don't know what Americans call that grade or year, for us it would have been what, 4th, 5th? They've changed the structure and numbering now, so it's hard to keep track. One of them had a habit of standing up in the middle of boring classes and start to randomly narrate sports matches out loud (soccer, specifically, because again, not American), and we thought it was awesome and hilarious, and thought he was cool and mostly were kinda nice to him as a result. He was a nice kid. I see him walking around town sometimes still.
    
    That memory generally endeared me to integrating kids in classes where it makes sense, but I've heard enough counterpoints from professional educators about the uses of keeping kids with special needs in smaller classes to get more specific help that I don't have a strong opinion about it. My understanding is that consensus on that one is reversed, and the kids in my life now that have specific needs are either in dedicated support groups or getting individual tutoring during the integrated classes. This is all public school I'm talking about.
    
    Now, here's the thing, I actually don't know if that transition could have happened in the US because, again, I am not American and I've never been to school in the US. I assume all the tropes in movies aren't fully accurate and Mean Girls and Dangerous Minds aren't documentaries, but who knows? My point is that I don't, and I'm not gonna be prescriptive about it or assume that everybody else's experiences are the same as my own.
    
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