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Screenshot of a Tumblr post by txttletale:
there are two countries. USA, and Europe. and everyine who says anything about the USA, that isb ad, is a Europeman. you use Celsius? congratulations. youre from Europe (the country)(European). you dont .ike Eat Delicious Jimmy’s Regional Hamburger Chain? okay Europe guy. youre not Joe Biden president? well then youre Privileged to have EuropePresident (the president of Europe) (Boris Johnson? ithink) so shut up about our American politics you ()Europe) (the only other place in the world) would never undrestanding, rthat in America, we have regional subdivisions and local dialects(you dont have those in Europe)(the other coutnry there is)(iuts just one coutnry basically and america is like 50 countries in a trenchoat did you know that?). and so. Youre not allowed to be mean to me or hamburger every again :/
It’s a common refrain that the United States geographically is one of the most heterogeneous places in the world, but we way we build our cities and towns and how we choose to operate as an overall society is super homogenous.
Although I disagree with the notion that there isn’t diversity within the US (some states may be less diverse than others however), there is a degree of truth that we tend to have the same people doing the same things from Alaska to Florida. That’s not to say there aren’t tweaks to the system depending on what the populations want (Compare California’s government policies to North Dakotas for example), but we have sort of accepted a homogeneous lifestyle as the way to do things, for better or worse.
Great video from Wendover Productions explaining this
My point is that you are stating differences between states, when your states are country sized. We have differences between regions in the country itself, wilder differences that yo have in your whole ass country.
There ought to be some differences in a country the size of 5 countries. What shocks us is how little differences there are.
Well, the US is about 250 years old as a society. How old is your country bud?
Less than 200 years old. And we have 3 languages, a huge cultural divide between the north and south, and more diversity in our provinces than in between us states.
What country?
Belgium. The current country was founded in 1830. We have Wallonia and Flanders who speak different languages, each province has or had its own dialect but it has merged mainly into french and dutch, with a bit of German in the east. The country itself is probably smaller than any us state, but I don’t know all the sizes of them.
Funnily enough, there is a small town in the US with Belgian immigrants that still speak older dialects of Walloon.
Didn’t realize Belgium was that diverse - according to the data it is slightly more diverse than the US with a diversity index of 0.55 compared to the US’S diversity index of 0.49. both of which are SIGNIFICANTLY more diverse than France (0.17) and more diverse Spain (0.42) according to this statistic. Many European countries that tut about diversity and varied culture fall pretty low on that list.
Also your point about the US community that speaks Walloon sort of illustrates my point. Almost every other culture in the world has a community or cultural center somewhere inside the US