swimming in the water

So i think that its funny that smith wants us to blog about things in our society that we don't realize are there and things we don't see cuz we are submerged in them. just throwing this out there but if we are not supposed to realize them and stuff how can we blog about them. well i will try my best i guess, here we go..... ok so some thing that might be considered water in our culture would be entertainment. like sports, clubs, games, computers, phones, ipods, any thing that is used or all about keeping us occupied while we are "bored". we are such a rich nation that most people don't even think twice about seeing a movie, watching sports on TV, or listening to music and sitting around. but there are people in under developed countries that cant even afford food and they work so hard and so long that they only have free time to go home and sleep. i am not saying that we don't work hard but we do have a lot more free time than most people and apposed to using money and resources on survival we can spend it on entertainment. i feel like we don't even think about all the things that we do or things that we have that are not essential to survival that other cultures don't have and cant get. we don't realize how lucky we are as a culture. if we had to worry about survival every day and wonder if we will live tomorrow that would change how we live and how we think completely.
One thing that a lot of people have a hard time doing is navigating through the virtually invisible "water" of there culture. i think that the only way to do this successfully is to step back and look at other cultures. it would help even more to talk with people from other places. because if you cant see what is different then how do you no what you have to work with you need to compare in order to fully understand your surroundings. like the example of you cant see the good with out the bad. so you need to be able to compare our culture to another one. i think that we adjust to our culture pressures all the time it might be a slow adjustment but we do. we used to be just like any under developed nation and had to worry about survival but slowly we shifter out of that and we would not have noticed that we did if we couldn't see under developed nations today.
there are a lot of values that Americans have, but there are a few that i would slightly alter to fit me better. one of the Values of America is to be successful. this usually means that your rich and have every thing you want. i just want to be well off i want to not have to worry but i don't want to be caught up in working all the time i want to be able to get out and enjoy life. another one is one thing that i value that has gone out the window from what i can see is community. i don't no any one that lives around me. when i went to visit a friend who lives in a small town in Iowa every one new every one and it was amazing. now I'm not saying that it has to be that extreme but we need to stop being such a closed off and privet society we need to venture out and meet people form more relationships with people. this will not only make us more friendly people and more excepting but it will help us to live healthier lives. so i hope that we can get a sense of community. but thats just what i see and how i feel about it