APRIL 22, SATURDAY

CULTURAL DIFFERENCES AND PERSONAL IDENTITY

I have tried a couple of times in the last couple of weeks to understand why the two and a half month trip I just returned from was so stimulating for me and why, on returning, I had a letdown, as I always do when returning from a long trip abroad which has happened at least twenty times during my life. My tendency has been to try and find universal reasons for travel being stimulating and returning being a letdown. But I keep getting tangled up and all my simple reasons, almost cliches, were unsatisfying. I kept writing but I stopped doing posts. And at this point I am still tangled up and still confused and invite anyone reading this to drop out of this conversation any time they want to since I’m not sure I believe what I am saying myself. Over four days I’ll feel my way along, first describing my own experience of being abroad and returning, then describing what I am projecting is my barber’s response to Asheville from a MAGA perspective. On the third day I’ll try to find a way of reconciling these two perspectives by listening to each other. And on the fourth day I will wonder if maybe our differences are simply different responses to cultural conventions on a kind of continuum ranging from people whose identity is rooted in traditional values they want to conserve to people who delight in having their cultural conventions dislocated who feel most alive when they can break out of cultural conventions. In all of this I won’t be able to avoid making judgments and being judgmental, but I will try, because I think when people’s basic identity is tied to cultural conventions or any set of values that being judgmental, and certainly arguing, can only be counterproductive. When people’s identity is at stake they have to be listened to seriously and their sense of self has be accepted, even when I have opposite beliefs.