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June 25, 2006
More Culture Shock
My culture shock has mostly abated and I've become accustomed to this different country called California. However, there are a couple of remnants left from the shock.
First, my girlfriend and I were coming home about 12:30am after visiting a friends house and saw a police helicopter with it's spotlight on about a mile ahead of us. As we got closer there was a mob of people outside some club and more than a few cops in cars, bicycles and so on. As I looked to the left some cops already had a few people on the ground and in handcuffs. Up ahead cops cars were zooming here and there and that's when I decided to put the car in reverse, head down an alley and go the opposite direction towards the freeway where I could go around the mayhem. Nothing was reported in the news the next day but my guess was that there was a fight in some club and one gang got into a fight with another gang. Boy it's great to be back in America.
Then today I watched two different cop shows, one of which made me like the police and one that didn't.
The first show was about a cop who is a "human punching bag." This means he goes out into dark alleys appearing drunk and lets himself get mugged. It was all caught on camera and it was pretty cool how he started to get hit and then two huge cops came screaming in and tackled the bad guys to the ground. The mugger went from hunter to prey in a split second and the look of terror on the mugger's face when a huge african american cop appeared out of nowhere and demolished the guy was priceless.
However, the second show "cops" wasn't as endearing. It was basically undercover cops preying on the poor and destitute. They would go into poor neighborhoods and bait the guys selling drugs. Drug dealers are not good, but it would be much more heartwarming if they sent in people to try and help these people so they wouldn't have to sell drugs. The cops in this show were egoistic turds who try to talk in a formal intelligent manner but lack the vocabulary and often get stuck while trying to form sentences with complex grammer and interspersed big words. Goes something like this:
Cop: Do you have any paraphernalia on your person?
Victim: Nah man, I ain't got sh*t.
Cop: (to the camera) It looks like this person is guilty of having narcotics on his,, um,, well it looks like he had some illegal stuff.
For the TV they also like to use a lot of force, yet quite interesting that all the people they tackled, slammed to the ground were black. The only white guys that were pulled over simply got a citation.
However, from living abroad, I've learned that there are always two sides to every story and it's easy to see the same issue from different viewpoints. If I was a cop I would also get tired of dealing with these issues and it's a tough job for them. But then again, all of the people in the show were uneducated and poor. In short, they need help instead of cops beating the hell out of them. There is no easy fix and I have no solution. Just an observation. Well, maybe I can offer an absurd solution just for fun. Perhaps if we just had a huge war in America like in Vietnam and millions got killed, slaughtered, maimed then we as a culture would tire of violence and become peaceful like the Cambodians and Vietnamese.
To have peace, maybe we should have more war until we are all exhausted or dead and then we could have a few decades of peace until we forgot what war was like and then start all over again!
Switching gears completely and going to a different subject that I really don't want to devote an entire post to I'd like to draw attention to the fact that only in America, the philosophy as fed to us by the evil box seems to be that we can save money by spending it. I've seen commercial after commercial telling me "JUST LOOK HOW MUCH YOU SAVE BY BUYING OUR PRODUCT!!!! IT'S A MUST HAVE!!!!" ------ Wouldn't we save money by not spending it?
Posted by Mateo at 11:01 AM | Comments (1)
June 4, 2006
More Culture Shock
The culture shock continues here in San Francisco!!! As every study abroad or expat knows, when returning to the home country, some things really stand out as strange or bizarre since even though it is your home country, it might seem a little foreign.
Well, San Francisco IS foreign!!! There are entire neighorhoods here where the population cannot speak English. Also, the culture is much different than my home state of Ohio. Here are some things that have really struck me this past week.
1. In the library, I went to the men's bathroom and saw one grunge looking guy come out of a stall and another grunge guy go immediately in. The guy who just came out slowly washed his hands and was suspiciously looking around while drying his hands. From my angle I could see the guys feet who just entered the stall and he wasn't even using the toilet. He then exited approx 30 seconds later. Apparently there was an exchange of some sort and my suspicion was that it was drugs. The main library also attracts many crazy people and those that like to talk on their cell phone.
2. I called a Chinese restaurant for takeout. The people in Saigon speak better English than the Chinese in San Francisco. Amazing.
3. An old white lady accidentially bumped into a young black women talking on her cell phone. The young black lady's response was "Damn, Bitch, you better...before I slap you."
4. You cannot walk three city blocks here without hearing vulgar language. I think San Franciscans are unable to form a proper sentence without the f-word.
And people wonder why I prefer Asia.....................
Posted by Mateo at 3:34 AM | Comments (5)