America; A culture behind walls.

[Mercury]

Americans are a hateful and paranoid peoples. So paranoid that Americans today live lives behind walls. They want nothing to do with other people or even anything outside their bubbles and walls. The recent red tide in Florida was a devastating blow to Florida's coastal economy. Unfortunately, Americans not only care about nothing but themselves, but they actually love seeing everything outside their walls destroyed and fallen into ruin. And they actually expect all Americans to be fully transient. I know Mr. Traveller posted that his favorite waitress quit working possibly due to the red tide. In America, you are expected to be a stranger, and stay a stranger, to every single person you encounter in the community. And to Americans, every single square foot of the entire outdoors, including all nature areas and national parks, is the hood. To Americans, no street or square block has ever gone more than an hour without a drive-by shooting. Every single poster, moderators and all, over on the city-data forum even continues to paint the entire State of Florida as one huge endless violent war zone, over a thousand times more dangerous than Berlin at the height of World War II. To them, hundreds of thousands of people an hour get mugged, robbed, assaulted, and shot on Florida's beaches. One of the worst hit areas by the red tide was Fort Myers Beach, where toxic blue-green algae dumped down the Caloosahatchee River mixed with the red tide and created a toxic "witch's brew" that killed massive amounts of marine life and stank up the air for up to a mile inland. But according to Americans, including on the city-data forum, Fort Myers Beach to them has over 2,000 drive-by shootings every day, day and night. To them, Fort Myers Beach crawls in broad daylight with serial killers, cop killers, fugitives, and prison escapees.

So what do Americans do today? They hide behind walls. Gated communities are one type of walled off hiding place. Many people are familiar with the semi invasive process of even visiting someone in a gated community. You have to show identification, and you have to state to the security guard who you are visiting before they will open the gate. Some gated communities might even require a visitor's pass displayed on your vehicle somehow. American women especially these days, they flock to gated communities like moths to a light. Most guys, including myself, tend to avoid gated communities. Even Google Street View doesn't like going into gated communities. But what does that do? It merely boosts womens' huge egos all the bigger and then they start labeling by default everyone terrorists, serial killers, rapists, sex predators, etc that avoid gated communities and cause mass fearmongering.

Another type of wall is houses that are surrounded by a high wall and a gate that requires a numerical combination to enter. The backyard, the house itself, and the garden are all enclosed by either an iron fence (often with a circle of vegetation for privacy) or a concrete wall. And sometimes even those are located in gated communities.

Even in non-gated suburban neighborhoods, there are still technically walls. The grass may be mowed, the hedges hedged, but everything is stark and bare looking. Often there are no gardens, no fruit trees, only plain grass and sometimes your common garden variety streetscape trees. And there is no outdoor activity at all; as one foreigner once put it, it's like looking at a post card.

[Winston]

My aunt lives in one of those gated communities in Las Vegas. She gave us a sticker fortunately on the windshield so we could go into the express lane for residents to drive through the gate without stopping for security. Inside the neighborhoods contain huge houses and resorts and golf courses. Everyone in them is polite and distant. They may smile to a stranger but that's it. There's this thick wall that separates everyone. No one socializes or is open or wants to really get to know anyone. Everyone is distant as can be. And there's a paranoid vibe too, as though you'd better be super prim and proper and do nothing controversial, only keep to yourself and say a superficial "hi" to strangers only.

That's modern America of course. No society I thin in the last 5,000 years of known history has ever been like this. I don't get why everyone acts like this is normal and never complains about it. Even the alternative media ignores this problem.

What's weird is that no one wants to make friends, but everyone assumes you already have a wife, a social clique and some friends already, it's a default assumption. Very odd. Hard to put into words. Sadly, people who never left America think that's normal but it isn't. Most of the rest of the world isn't like that at all.

[Mercury]

My aunt lives in one of those gated communities in Las Vegas. She gave us a sticker fortunately on the windshield so we could go into the express lane for residents to drive through the gate without stopping for security. Inside the neighborhoods contain huge houses and resorts and golf courses. Everyone in them is polite and distant. They may smile to a stranger but that's it. There's this thick wall that separates everyone. No one socializes or is open or wants to really get to know anyone. Everyone is distant as can be. And there's a paranoid vibe too, as though you'd better be super prim and proper and do nothing controversial, only keep to yourself and say a superficial "hi" to strangers only.

That's modern America of course. No society I thin in the last 5,000 years of known history has ever been like this. I don't get why everyone acts like this is normal and never complains about it. Even the alternative media ignores this problem.

What's weird is that no one wants to make friends, but everyone assumes you already have a wife, a social clique and some friends already, it's a default assumption. Very odd. Hard to put into words. Sadly, people who never left America think that's normal but it isn't. Most of the rest of the world isn't like that at all.

And the worst is that in America, you don't have a wife and/or a social clique, and people look at you like you belong in the electric chair, as if you were wanted for something as major as even quadruple capital murder. They even look at you like they think you escaped from Pelican Bay State Prison or Sing-Sing Correctional Institution and are even profiled on America's Most Wanted. And in a growing part of America's population, being without a social clique is starting to make guys look like even terrorists about to blow something up and/or do a huge massacre. A growing portion of Americans are starting to label lone guys as "a ticking time bomb."

And you are right, Americans, especially in gated communities, they expect you to mind your own business like it's a capital felony under Federal law to say more than a superficial "Hi." Like in other words, engaging in conversation about your trip to Yellowstone National Park or Walt Disney World is even a Homeland Security matter with a mandatory sentence of 300 years to life in Federal prison and/or the death penalty for all involved.

[Mercury]

I even remember reading in a psychology class once about what if the United States of America became a nation of gated communities.