The lack of travel is not why we tend to say that though.
1) The situation is fucked up beyond belief because white Europeans colonized the entire continent while not having the population to need that much space in the first place. If you want more borders and more cultural diversity, go vote to give back land to the natives, call your representatives. 3 percent of your country, that’s nearly 10 million people, still don’t get to live their own culture on their own land, under their own rule. Grant them complete independence and the money and resources to rebuild their land, build schools where they teach in Hawaiian, Na-Dene or Iñupiaq, among others, instead of English.
I understand the situation that you are in, but let’s not forget that this situation is your countries own responsibility. Your continent is a large monoculture mostly because it was made to be so. We can also create easily accesible cultural diversity if we encourage it to grow.
As long as you play national sport competitions that you call world series, as long as you pledge allegiance to the flag everyday, as long as you still have a two party system of a far right and a center-right political party, you will have to deal with the stereoype of being uncultured. That has nothing to do with not being able to travel, and everything to do with literally being a country that constantly oppresses cultural diversity at any chance it can get.
2) The situation being fucked up beyond belief does not negate that you don’t leave the USA mentally either. Almost 80% of your country is monolingual English speaker. In Europe 56% is bilingual.
To graduate high school, 16 states don’t require you to learn a second language, 24 leave it as optional. you have 430 languages being spoken or signed in the states, 117 of them are indigineous to your land and native people! one in 5 people don’t speak english at home.
You can start learning a language today.
You don’t need to travel 8 hours to find a reason to learn more cultures. Look at at your own family, your neighbors, you classmates/coworkers. do you understand them and their culture? Try foods from different cultures, eat some Vada Pav, Hete Bliksem, Räkmacka or Jianbing. Try out foods you’ve never tried before, and if you aren’t sure: ask what something is made of, google the history of the dish, and look up the pronunciation in the original languages. Wikipedia that shit.
3) You’re a country built by immigrants, settlers, Native people and imported slaves. You are literally the biggest, most excessive, cartoonishly obvious example of a melting pot culture in the western world. Go watch a bollywood movie with subtitles every once in a while, listen to welsh music, download babbel or duolingo or something and learn one or two languages, read books from different countries, study different religions, and when you are hungry go eat a meal in a restaurant from a culture you’ve never eaten from before. try new things.
You don’t even need to leave San Francisco to find someone you can speak French, Spanish, Tagalog, Xhosa or Hindi with. Don’t use the 8 hour train way as an excuse.
4) Europeans, Asians and Native Americans mostly say “you don’t have any culture“ because we often have to deal with tourists and internet shoppers trying to americansplain our own culture back to us, while not even speaking the language.
All the reason you seem to need to tell us that the “Leaning Tower of Pisa should be in Rome” is apparently that your grandmother was Italian, while at the same time forgetting that A) your grandmother was a sicillian immigrant, and B) it’s called the Leaning Tower of Pisa because it’s in Pisa. We know that. You, when you DO travel to our countries, don’t even seem to do some light reading beforehand.
“Dealing with Americans who don’t know that different countries have different cultures, and therefor different societal expectations, rules and perspectives“ is a very common experience when dealing with people on the internet and with tourists. I am not kidding when I tell you that I have had to tell more than a dozen american tourists that Rotterdam is in fact not a walking distance away from Amsterdam. Most of them were offended because they thought I was lying, also claiming they knew better because they were (fill in a weird percentage) dutch heritage. It might just be me, but knowledge and culture isn’t blood related. Behavior rarely is, too, and even when it is, it’s not something like “Well I am Russian, so I must like vodka“. That is not how things work, but that is the kind of people we have to deal with, because you don’t actually have any interest in learning what other cultures actually are like.
It’s not your lack of travelling we are annoyed by, it’s your hypocrisy of maintaining a self-centered anglocentric culture, while having such rich cultural diversity that you just blatantly ignore, while you are ALSO bothering every single person in the world with your know-it-all attitude and your weird bloodline alchemy beliefs in which you seem to thing that cultural traits are blood inherited and you therefor don’t need to do research.
