My cousin and his wife were American tourists walking the streets of a not-to-be-named European city when he overheard a couple behind them say some very insulting things about them in German. He ignored this for a couple of minutes, but the couple became louder and more rude, actually laughing because they believed he didn’t understand what they were saying.

Finally, he turned and spoke to them in German, asking them to stop. Rather than apologize and move on, the couple began a new mean-spirited conversation in French. My cousin knows multiple languages, and they went through five before the couple gave up.

When my cousin told this story, I could almost hear the couple muttering as they left, “Damn those Americans! Is noting sacred. Now we can’t even insult them when we want to anymore! What’s the world coming to?”

Btw, I’m bugged by dragging flip flops, too – and I’m not that old.

The father became a citizen this year, and the mother got her green card last year and is working on her citizenship papers. I have tutored most of the children.

Our greatest culture difference is with food. The mother won’t eat any ground beef. She is an excellent cook, as far as her background goes, and I like most of her food. However, one year at Christmas she tried to feed me some soup that had pigs feet floating around in it. I looked at her and said, “You don’t eat my hamburgers–I don’t eat your pigs feet.” Then we both laughed and everything was ok.

My point was that as I had that experience it made me suddenly wonder what it must be like for minorities coming to Utah who had never had that experience of literally being the minority.

To your main point, I remain convinced that most of our prejudices are due to ignorance and ignorance is due to just not experiencing the familiarity with people we ought have. Hopefully we all experience shakeups to get us out of any prejudices we still have. (And we all have them – even if they may not be racially based) I really think that going to an area where we are the minority is a good thing.

I still remember coming to Utah and being so freaked out at a basic level that there were no African Americans at any of the grocery stores. It was a bit of a shock after spending much of my mission in areas where often I was the only European-American in the store.

But I’m trying not to be annoyed.

Side note: I thought only those who attended UVSC in the last 4 years could get updated degrees? I could definitely be mistaken, however.

Perhaps it takes hardship and tragedy to unite the natural man, but it doesn’t have to be.