by Christyl Rivers

Created on: December 23, 2011   Last Updated: December 24, 2011

We all know the stereotypes. The Asian girl is quiet, smart, shy, well-behaved. The Asian boy is good in math and science, maybe he plays violin, and he loves baseball. Both children are obedient, loyal to their relations, respectful of their elders. Contrast this with the stereotype of the western child. He, or she, is wearing torn ill-fitting shirts and dirty jeans. They hang out in the mall. They are emo. They are goth. They are punk, or they are jocks, and/or cowboys. They are rebelling against: “What have you got?”

They take drugs and ditch school. They suck at math and science. They are shiftless and selfish. The Asian parents expect a lot from their kids. They are tigers and dragons. The western parents are overweight, love cars and sports. They are cougars and cowboys. The Asians eat a lot of noodles and rice. The westerners eat a lot of corn, corn syrup (HFCS) and corn transformed into cows, pigs, and chickens, on factory farms.

Asian women are stereotyped as being non liberated, exotic, and exploited. Western women are seen as loose, liberated, shallow and spoiled. They can't all be accurate, given the soon to expire shelf-life of misogyny.

In the west, people use vast quantities of time and energy, in both body and machine, to fill up lives with gadgets, stuff, fashion, junk food, and entitlements that show rugged independence, even rebelliousness. In the east, beginning with India and moving further across the Middle East to the orient, people are much more connected to family, tribe, nation, community, and in some cases nature itself.

Religion is approached differently as well. For most of the last 100,000 years, people lived in nature and so worshipped with reverence the earth, moon, and stars and a wide range of deities. In the west Christian-Judeo cultures brought monotheism. Although there are good and practical reasons to honor and appreciate the living earth, monotheism gradually led to abandonment of most pagan ideas. Now the three biggest monotheisms continue to fight and spill blood because there are three different names for the guy in the sky: Yahweh, Allah, and God.

It brings to mind the famous scene in Life of Brian, where no group can agree upon what to call their movement. Is it the Judean People’s Front, or the People’s Front of Judea?

Television and movies added entire new dimensions to the assimilations and shared knowledge of all cultures, but it also engrains some stereotypes even deeper.

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