I agree with your post with the exception of your first part. I used to live in Detroit a few decades ago, and saw a large difference in culture when I visited relatives in Small-Town Indiana, population 2000. I should not have said the two cultures are left/right when I actually meant urban/rural.
I think you have a different definition of culture than I do. The culture of Americans also have a large overlap with many European and South American cultures if you want to look at it your way. I was focusing on distinguishing features of Americans that lack commonality with other countries.
Differences, of course, catch our attention much more than commonalities do, just as do things that move compared to things that remain in place. Those relatives probably grew up immersed in the same or similar Christian-influenced culture, they celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas, they prefer liberty to servitude, they want to make a living, live in reasonable security, and hope for a brighter future for their kids, and they didn't sacrifice you to some god or goddess, or have you for supper, obviously. Yes, they may have exhibited this or that behavior that seemed "odd", but this stood out because 99% of the rest was the same or reasonably similar.
It doesn't matter whether you call it left-right, or urban-rural, the commonalities still vastly exceed the differences. It's politics that makes Americans forget that, and tries to focus everybody on a few differences to divide the population.
Famously, there was a psychology test. Participants were handed a piece of paper and a pen (half blue, the other half red ones), and they were made to wait in a room together for the test to begin. Lo and behold, when the researchers some minutes later stepped into the room, the participants had sorted themselves according to the color of their pen. That is, I am convinced, what happens in the U.S. of A. right now: Sorting themselves along such utterly meaningless features as the color of their pen.
But is it meaningless? Misguided possibly. Imcomprehensible at times. Certainly destructive at times. But understanding changes in emphasis and point of view are not meaningless.
I do NOT want this thread to disintegrate into a discussion of pros and cons of religion or any form of religious observance, but use this as an example only:
Example:
There have always been those who rejected the Church. The atheists have always been with us. But for most of two centuries the nation was allowed pretty much unrestricted religious liberty. It was okay for schools to acknowledge national Holidays and traditional observances such as Christmas and Easter. The Ten Commandments could be hung in a classroom or be engraved in a work of art in a courthouse. Student led prayers or a moment of silence to start the school day or a generic prayer at a sporting event were not seen as a problem. Our high school performed Handel's Messiah as a Christmas tradition every year and folks from miles around--Christians, Jews, atheists, and everybody else--looked forward to it and attended. A religious symbol or something similar could be used at "show and tell" without even a ripple of objection. A Baccalaureate Service was held on a night near graduation each year, and usually it was the minister or rabbi parent of one of the seniors who was the speaker.
At the same time no theocracy developed at any level of government, and of all my teachers from first grade through college, I could tell you what religion only three of them practiced and that was incidental. I couldn't tell you the religious beliefs of any of them. And we all learned solid science including Darwin and natural selection, theories of origins of the universe many billions of years ago and we were immersed in solid history and were encouraged to evaluate the the negative and the positive within each aspect of it.
And the schools were safe places with no security necessary. In communities where most kids had a mom and dad in the home and there were lots of churches and synagogues, crime, especially violent crime of any kind was rare.
As that cultural paradigm changed, we simultaneously saw the nuclear family of mom, dad, and kids become less the norm and then the exception. Any recognition of religion in the schools or anywhere in the public sector came under significant attack so that the schools became completely a-religious. The requirement of political correctness was pushed pretty much everywhere.
And at the same time we saw a lot more bullying, school shootings and other violence became all too frequent, there was a breakdown in discipline and school security became a major issue. And verbal and sometimes physical warring in the public sector became commonplace.
Acknowledging that correlation is not the same thing as causation,but it definitely warrants a good, honest, hard consideration to determine what actually is the reason behind such a major cultural paradigm shift.
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