memes

It's been fun travelling to a few foreign places in the world as a brown long haired Indigenous Canadian.

My wife is Caucasian and she never had a problem asking for help or talking to people on the street in Europe. I was out on my own many times in places like Rome, Paris, Berlin just to sight see and the number of people that either just ignored me, looked at me in disgust or actively just wanted to avoid me was amazing. Not everyone was like this but a good percentage ... I'd say more than half the time, people were nice ... especially Germans which was a big surprise to me. We'd met many German tourist outside their country and the majority of them were jerks ... meet Germans in their home country and they're the nicest people you could meet and talk to. Spanish were indifferent, Portuguese will talk your ear off no matter who or what you look like, French will be nice to you only if you can speak a bit of French and Italians were the worst to people of colour. The English are great as long as you are sober and they are sober .. I don't drink and the only English people I ever enjoyed were the ones that were nowhere near alcohol ... as soon as they get near drinks, nothing is enjoyable with them. BUT this is all my personal experience of having travelled to Europe many times over about 15 years.

As soon as I went out with my wife, I was treated better ... but as soon as I was on my own, whole different story.

I have to say that racism is far less now than it was 30 - 40 years ago ... I can say that confidently as a brown skinned person in Canada. My dad was born in the 1930s and he said that in the 1950s / 60s, racism was completely normal to the point where he wasn't even allowed in some small towns in northern Ontario ... it wasn't a law, it was just a common understanding that 'no Indians were allowed here'.

So even though racism is far less today ... it doesn't mean it's been completely eliminated. And in some areas, its more prominent than others.

The tragedy of humanity is that we know we can be better than non-sapient animals responding out of emotional, knee-jerk survival instinct that is necessary in the wild but destructive in civilization. We have sparks, inklings, we can see the higher path, the path where our sapience has created the ability/technology to feed, clothe, shelter, educate, and even facilitate self-actualization for EVERYONE.

It's right there, some even do it on a small scale, very rarely humanity makes a step in that direction before taking a step back.

But most of the time, that inkling is extinguished. Our higher, sapient, empathetic mind still not quite evolved enough to overcome our lower brain that sees everyone else as competition and a threat that can only be defeated, ensuring individual survival, by hoarding moooooaaaar than them, and keeping them away.

Juuuuuuust barely smart enough to split the atom with concerted team effort, but still so dominated by our base, animalistic impulses that we did it explicitly to first and foremost make big boomie boom rival monkey tribe.

Wait is this a respond to the map meme?

I’m liking this meme back and forth lemmy has going!

If you can speak more than one language, that's really impressive to me. I speak English and beginner Spanish and I'm so timid I hardly even try to speak Spanish because I don't want to sound like an idiot.

Man, I've tried to get decent at Spanish, and utterly fail, even with friends that speak it as a first language helping me.

There's no way in hell I can think of anyone using English poorly as a second language as anything other than a peer. And they'll likely get better at English while I still suck with Spanish.

Besides, I know too damn many people with English as a first language that are horrible with it.

Anyone even trying to use another language is a great thing to me. Our ability as humans to bridge the gap between selves with language is a powerful and beautiful thing, so someone attempting to bridge that gap further is just as beautiful, no matter how well they do it. It makes me happy when I run into someone making that kind of effort, and I can take the time to help them do what they want, or joust have a human interaction.

Plus, I've never, ever run into a situation where just trying to help someone navigate an English speaking majority didn't end up with both of us smiling and at least a little better off than we were before. I wish I had the ability to learn new languages quickly and fluently. I just keep failing at it lol.

When I was younger, I genuinely wanted to study linguistics for a while. It was running into the difficulty with gaining fluency in Spanish that made me rethink that.

So, fuck hating on someone that's putting in the effort. I have mad respect for that.

Related: https://piped.video/watch?v=PxuUkYiaUc8

Yep, 100%. I know my accent in spanish is ugly.

Speaking my language in any other accent than the most ghetto one possibe

Speaking my language in the most ghetto one possible. Sounding like a drug dealer.