Are We? As the world moves into the 21st century I feel that everyone is slowly but surely becoming similar in many ways. For one most countries with a stable government and economy now have American fast food all over the place. Mcdonalds is slowly taking over the world and there’s nothing we can do about it. American popculture is now everywhere, our celebrities are now becoming inspirations for upcoming stars from other countries looking to imitate the success that we have had. Bollywood is just a Hollywood with a lot less money injected into it and with a lot more musical to it. If you ignore the song and dance theme and the belly-dancing there are similarities. For one, their movies get pirated just as much as ours do!

Then, well the idea or concept is similar. The same goes for the Hong Kong movies. Where do you think Bruce Lee (Enter the Dragon) came from or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? Everyone is trying on our culture to see if they like it. While this is good in most cases, are we breeding a America look alike world? It’s true that in some place some people truely hate or dislike the United States. Take for instance France or any other deeply tradition European country. They certainly don’t like us very much, but they don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Everything changes eventually and so eventually Europe will have drastic changes also.

My point is while, the spreading of our influence is really ego-boosting, at the same time our culture has a lot of things that shouldn’t be spread.  For instance, somethings that exist in America can really only exist in America, take the example of wages.  Our hourly wage has been the same for a very long time while the cost of living has gone up tremendously!  Where would we be without our Mexican grass-cutters?  They support our economy so much that if you were to extract every single last one of them, our internal systems would collaspe overnight.

Also, another point is, do you want to see exotic places such as India, or Japan full of McDonalds and KFC?  Where is our interest in preserving the cultures of other peoples?  We go on vacation for a reason, to get away from all the American things that are in our world and yet we see them in most of the places we visit…  Maybe jumping on the Globalization (Americanization) bandwagon so quick and so soon is not the best idea.  Slow and steady wins the race, no?