> I’m not judging you. Again, I might be wrong, but every time I've read or heard the word "selfish", it was always used as a judgment. > ask yourself how you

> I’m not judging you. Again, I might be wrong, but every time I've read or heard the word "selfish", it was always used as a judgment. > ask yourself how you can have a positive impact and make your new home a better place I was under the impression that having a discussion about how to improve things with a group of people who might be in a better position than average to help improve them was also a way of working towards that goal. > Perhaps that sense of personal responsibility is an American affectation. This is the third country I've lived in, including my own country of birth. My experience is limited, but it's still more than the average person gets. From that experience, it seems to me to be a generational thing, much more than cultural. It can be seen in different attitudes that different generations adopt towards their employers: generally older generations see their employer as part of their life and a kind of a "family", whereas younger generations view it as a business transaction with severe imbalance of power. I expect same thing happens with patriotism. There does seem to be at least one cultural aspect to it, though. Americans, as well as citizens of other countries where capitalism has advanced to similar extremes, seem to view things with a sense of "personal responsibility" rather than collective or communal responsibility. > As one of our leaders once said, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. That seems even more apropos for those who have made the conscious decision to adopt this place as their home. Why would it seem "even more apropos" for immigrants? I honestly don't understand this logic: why would you expect guests in your home to take better care of it than you do yourself? And I use the word "guest", rather than "fosterling", because not all immigrants come here immediately convinced that this will be their new home. Here's a truth about a lot of us immigrants: we come here with a hope, but not with a conviction. We would have preferred to live a happy, fulfilled life in our own country and we tried, but for whatever reason we couldn't and we decided to leave. The definition of insanity, as they say, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Besides, we're not talking about what the country can do for me. We're talking about what the country can do for its future generations. I already have an excellent education. But I have a much bigger responsibility to my own son, than to your country or even my own.