It's been... well, I'm too lazy to do the math on how long it's been, so in that spirit I'll tell you all about Americans in general. This is just a thought that's been bouncing around in my head for awhile. It has struck me that much of the world feels that Americans are incredibly stupid. Ironically, this entire time we've been referring to Canadians as 'stupid.' In fact they made a video dedicated to this 'fact.' I assure you, we're not as stupid as that video makes it seem; I assume they just edited out anyone that could answer the questions correctly. We are certainly not cultured in a traditional sense, since in my experience many Americans feel that if you come here you should speak English. "Egotistical" is the word a woman used when I went up to Canada some years ago. Sadly, that's pretty accurate.

There are a number of things that Americans in general cannot differentiate between in the slightest, and geography and culture are on the top of that list. Case and point:

Irish/Scottish- We have absolutely no clue as to what the difference is here. If someone were to ask us to mimic the Irish accent, it would inevitably deteriorate into a mix of Lucky Charms and Shrek.

Japanese/Chinese/Korean... - Once again, we can't tell the differences for our lives. We tend to throw them all into the category "Asian." "Oriental" is what was used back in the 80s or so, but it's not "politically correct" anymore. Really, I know there are others, but I'm hard-pressed to think of another country in the area, thus further proving that geography is not one of our strong points.

Dominican/Mexican/Puerto Rican/Cuban... - We group these nationalities into the set "latino" and moved on. A lot of people would throw the blanket nationality of "Mexican" on all of them, but that's something I'm happy to say I don't do.

Russian/Polish/Turkish- We don't even have a word to group these all into. Some would even throw German in there since, unsurprisingly, they don't have a clue. They're basing their knowledge on wars that happened over half-a-century ago. At this point, we should be happy if an American could pick the right hemisphere.

South Americans- We know where South America is, sure, but naming more than two or three countries down there would be quite a feat. And being able to differentiate between the nationalities? Just... don't ask.

There are exceptions to these rules, particularly with people that have studied in related fields such as language courses, or anthropology. But that's quite key to our culture: we're specialists. If we're good at anything, it's pretty much that one thing and maybe a few others. The majority of the United States detests mathematics with a passion and as such, we offer up only our most mathematically apt nerds to the god Mathios to do our bidding so that we don't have to learn how to solve derivatives and logarithms and whatnot. While it's to a somewhat less degree, we really don't like science either. We have a different god we offer up those nerds to. Ironically enough, that leaves culture, which we clearly flunked out of in the previous section. So what does that leave the majority of us to do? Well, that's simple: mindless, pointless service tasks.

We provide services and entertainment to a massive degree. We work in the services industry doing things others don't want to do so that we can pay someone else in another service industry to do yet another task that we ourselves are too lazy to do. We have fast food restaurants that cook our food for us, we have maids, butlers or whatever the politically correct term is to clean our houses so that we don't have to, we have 'installers' for everything from floors to video games. We have someone for everything. Then we have 1,000,001 television channels so we don't have to suffer through boredom and/or work. We have artists for every genre of music, including some genres that may have been better off never being created. We even created a site so that people could entertain others for free. We are a society so incredibly wrapped around the entertainment industry that when the writers for television shows went on strike, it was a pretty big deal. Apparently the show 'American Gladiators' is still on because its ratings received a bump during that period.

True enough, I am selling my country's people short by quite a bit. I myself am clearly not a complete idiot and I'm certainly not the only one. The US boasts its fair share of 'educationally impaired' citizens that are kept afloat by the buoying intellectuals who hold varying levels of knowledge on many subjects, but still edge towards specialization. I have a professor at my university who spent about 20 years in college studying a number of subjects. Meanwhile, universities are having to turn away students all the time because of the high number of people applying to enroll. We are certainly not all aimed at service and entertainment, though there is a disturbingly large population of pseudo-intellectuals that flow into the mix all the time, basing expertise on limited study and 'experience.' You see this all the time on news programs with 'experts' and 'analysts.'