Question Details	Asked By	Asked On
respect in USA --- Hi. I am from Ukraine originally, and people pay attention to respect a lot	neo_the_one	07/04/03
respect in USA --- Hi. I am from Ukraine originally, and people pay attention to respect a lot. I mean, they try to look good, get good job, get married etc, and mostly it is because they want to be respected by other people. There is no laws governing ethics, so people basically say what they feel. If you get bad grades, expect to hear, "hey, watch doing, fool", or if you dont get married "hey, so you so ugly that nobody wants you, hugh?" and similar. After moving to USA I noticed that there is another philosophy. Everyone can do with his life anything he wants, if it legal and ethical, and everyone should respect their cholices. I mean, if I like to have bad grades, bad clothes, be fat, live alone, not to work etc, people should respect me. I wonder whether people really respect such people, who are not active in making themselves respectable? Do you really respect a man, working as a janitor and het drunk every evening or a professor, who works hard to make many discoveries? Do you respect a bum and a a hard working man the same? Do you respect managers and technical staff the same? Is it possible that a manager os a big compnay invites a mexican janitor woman for a date, after he sees her cleaning offices after work? I dont wanna have a car. Will you respect me as well as thouse having cars?
Clarification/Follow-up by neo_the_one on 07/04/03 11:04 pm: But will you respect janitors the same as say managers? Car owners and not? Clarification/Follow-up by neo_the_one on 07/04/03 11:04 pm: But will you respect janitors the same as say managers? Car owners and not?
Answered By		Answered On
Jim.McGinness		07/04/03
Your observations are very interesting. For those of us immersed in it, the culture of the US is not really as egalitarian and democratic as some of the schoolbooks would have you believe. There are a lot of status competitions going on all the time and the only good thing I can say about it is that, for the most part, the status competitions are patchy and contradictory -- there is no single pecking order that determines who is on top or that _everyone_ higher than you on it is able to dominate you. There is much worshipping of celebrities, but different kinds of celebrities are marketed to different audiences and there is not much overall agreement that stars in one field are "better" than stars in another field. There's a lot of homogeneity amongst what is broadly termed the Middle Class, even though this term is applied to people across a very broad range of income, wealth, and educational achievements. We do, for the most part, respect each others' choices about how to live their lives, but that applies more strongly to the people who we share neighborhoods with than people who are farther away.

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