Just the other day, I caught this video, Matthew McConaughey on George Lopez, on Facebook and it really made me think.

For one, there was the t-shirt that McConaughey was wearing that bore the caption, “i didn’t ask to b a Mexican.” What really drew me in was when he said, in Spanish, how he grew up in a mostly Hispanic town and learned Spanish through his friends. While his Spanish wasn’t the best, I understood the gist of what he was trying to say.

I thought to myself, “Matthew McConaughey could be a sign of the ‘New America.’” Here, we have a guy raised around people from another ethnicity (Latinos) in the United States, married to someone from another country (Brazil) and understands the basics of other languages (Portuguese and Spanish). From what I could see, he respects other cultures because he was raised around other cultures.

When you look at other cultures, not from the perspective of superiority but out of curiosity and respect, then you are able to appreciate different things that they might have to offer. I have been fortunate enough to travel to different countries including Mexico, Canada, England, France and, recently, Italy. That I can recall I have never had a single bad experience at the hands of any of these countries’ citizens. I have always shown them nothing but respect. If in a country where they speak a language other than English, I make an attempt to speak their language and, usually, I find that I am respected more for it. I don’t cram my Americanness onto them and I don’t force them to speak English in their own countries. I approach them out of respect.

We need to transcend this failure to communicate. People from other cultures aren’t the problem. The problem isn’t that people from other countries hate us. The problem is that we thrust our “Americanness” onto other countries and onto our own citizens—the school of thought that our country has no flaws.

We need to move past this failure to communicate. If there were more people like Matthew McConaughey who make an honest, earnest attempt to get past this failure to learn from other cultures, then our country could be the one that we all imagine it to be. Are we willing to make the attempt to communicate?

 

Author: José A. Rodríguez