Cross Cultural Tips

[blamebrampton]

Still plaguey. Will be fine once I can sleep without any coughing. Way behind in sending out flist love, but LOVE!!!! to all of you, especially the ones having crap weeks.

Very shortly, I have noticed that Australia and America have been exerting cultural influences on each other more strongly of late, and just wanted to share a few hints on the topic.

Things Australians SHOULD do more like Americans
* Personal and corporate philanthropy
* Respect for and interest in the arts
* Recognition of people achieving in academic fields and celebration of those achievements

Things Australians SHOULD NOT do more like Americans
* Politics (I'm looking at you, Tony Abbott!)
* Health care (Still looking!)
* Pop music (OK, this time it's whoever that crap was on 2Day that was playing in the Turkish pizza place. But I feel certain Tony Abbott's probably bought the CD.)

Things Americans SHOULD do more like Australians
* Irony. Some of you have the hang of it, but it needs wider acceptance
* Health care
* Media critique (there's not enough mixed ownership here, but there is a solid focus on cross-checking and making loud reports about perfidy when certain outlets are crap)

Things Americans SHOULD NOT do more like Australians
* Constant natural disasters
* EPIC STORMS
* Wear flipflops to work, even if they have some sparkly bits glued on. They're not professional. And I have been here too long as I originally wrote thongs and then realised the enormous potential for cross-cultural confusion.

Stay safe you East Coast kids. That earthquake looks like fun in comparison, I'll bet.

Comments

[pushdragon.livejournal.com]

Lovely. And can I add to the last list 'Callous refugee policy'. Perhaps if Australia had land borders, we'd lose our terror of immigration and stop describing desperate refugees arriving in numbers too small to make a decent Sheffield Shield crowd as an 'invasion'. Why can't we swap Tony for 4000 refugees from the Malaysian camps? Probably Malaysia knocked that back as a bad deal.

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

YES! Good grief, I can't believe I forgot that. Americans have much better refugee policies, bless em.

Surely we could convince Malaysia on that one, his ears would make useful weather vanes and I am sure he would be a wiz on the seniors triathlon circuit!

[pushdragon.livejournal.com]

They should do that as a Gruen Transfer challenge. It would be the campaign of the century to sell that deal to the Malaysians.