I was SO disapointed with my father tonight. Okay, I'm PMSing and things REALLY get to me a lot more than usual during this time, but what he said is something that bothers me any day of the month, and that is, referring to óther cultures as "stupid", "idiotic", "fundamentalist", just using all the wrong words in general to talk about something you're not a part of, just because it's different than what you know. My mom was telling us stories of someone she knows, who lived in Italy for many years and experienced cultural shock, like how they don't bathe daily like we do and therefore smell bad, how they don't know how to throw a party like we do, and how they're offended if you try to bargain. I said, okay, but did she meet ALL Italians?? Because if she only hung out with some people, that doesn't count for ALL of the citizens of a country. Besides, I said, if you're out of your country, you gotta try to understand that YOU are the one who has to try harder to fit in, and understand that just because is or isn't a big deal in your country, it doesn't mean it has to be that way everywhere. So I gave an example, of a tv show I was watching the other day, an architect living in Taipei was telling how different it was there, how important feng shui is to them, like, she was part of a project for a family house where the couple and theeir child were gonna live. But the mom died, and they had to change everything because of that, there was a door that couldn't be there anymore because a person had died (I don't remember what having the door meant). Here, that would make no difference, but death and spirituality is handled in different ways in different places, so it doesn't matter what my own beliefs are, if I'm gonna live in that country, I gotta adapt to that. And in her office too, there was a Budah image that had to be facing in a certain direction.
So he said "oh like the Muslims, that have to pray facing a certain direction, too", I said yeah, and thought, happily, that my point was made. That was when he started going on about how idiotic it is to be praying ALL day (yeah, ALL day, like they do nothing else) in a certain way, and be bowing a thousand times. I said, well, have you noticed how in Catholic church we kneel and stand up a thousand times, too? Oh but that's different. Yeah, of course it's different, I said, because that's how YOU grew up
It's like he hadn't been listening to ONE single word I said. I mean, I know my father is narrow minded when it comes to...almost everything, really, but at least on this matter, I hoped he would at least think before using disrespectful vocabulary like that. But I guess it was silly of me to expect that
