Coming to the US

It was the week before my first semester in college at Texas Tech and I was going through the process of settling in to the dorm and finding my bearings, when I saw several of the guys carrying around punch cards. From their talk it became obvious that they were using them for registration.

"What's that?" I asked.

"It's a registration permit," one guy answered. "Don't you have one'"

"No," I said.

"Well, you have to have one to register."

"How did you get yours? I never got one."

"The registrar's office mailed it."

I headed to the registrar to find out what to do. They assured me they had sent it weeks before and suggested I try the campus post office to see if it had been returned. I dutifully followed their suggestion and, when I made inquiries at the post office, they rummaged through the returned mail and found a letter for me containing the registration permit.

"It came back," they said.

I looked at the stamp: they had addressed it to my house in Buenos Aires but put a six-cent stamp on it. No wonder. You could not get mail to an international address with six cents, the national rate. I pointed this out to them and they simply shrugged.

This scenario repeated for every semester at Texas Tech until I graduated. They never managed to understand that international postage was required for an address in Argentina. You see, my parents were missionaries in Argentina for forty years. I was born in Fort Worth, Texas, where I now live, but when I was three years old we traveled to Argentina, where I grew up until I finished high school.

I found on arrival in the US that everyone assumed that the US is exceptional, the best and most advanced country in the world, that we are so much better than everyone else that other countries do not matter. They could not distinguish Argentina from Australia, or asked if we rode horses to school, or assumed we liked Mexican food, which in fact could not be more different than Argentine cuisine. At the time I was understandably irritated and annoyed by this attitude, which still persists in various ways. We shoot ourselves in the foot by assuming we know best: we meddle in other countries militarily and are amazed at never achieving what we set out to achieve, we never learn from other countries how to lay out cities to make them pleasant and fill our needs, to use the metric system to simplify calculations, to value culture over commerce, or to draw lessons from history.

I know many Americans who do not fit this mold, who have traveled and read widely, and who appreciate other cultures, but it still has not shaken our national ethos nor our foreign policy from their course. We have a lot going for us, but we are not the only country in the world.