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I recently saw an item in my newfeed about The American Exchange Project:
There was some positive feedback in the news article I read. I found it a bit surprising just how much the rural/urban divide has grown. I've often lived between the two areas with my schools often having kids living in high density housing along with kids raising barn animals. My parents preferred living rurally, but still had to live close to cities to find jobs.
I've been on two exchange programs myself. One as a middle/high schooler going to Europe with Student Ambassadors (a now dead org). And the second as more of a work exchange trip going to the company's India office. There is something undeniably effective about just having very different people sit down and talk/interact with each other in a non-violent setting. Not that I really disliked either set of people before visiting them, but I felt I definitely understood them better afterwards. There are coincidences of living, and the things you see living in an area. They just sorta seep into your conscious. My young middle school self noticed that Europe generally did not give a crap about topless women. Tits galore on billboards and beaches in Spain. Europe was also pretty open with alcohol, and the 15 year old in the German family I stayed with openly told her parents about the drinking party she was going to. They had to remind her that I wasn't allowed to go, and American drinking ages had to be explained. Bunch of things I noticed in India as well, main one was just the sheer volume of people.
Had a shower thought today about how some people (like Joe Rogan) thought Covid would bring us closer together as we worked to solve and fight a collective problems. I think we maybe mostly agree that did not happen. I'm starting to think that covid was the opposite kind of problem we need. To get that kind of problem solving, humanity coming together juice, I think more people need to be offline, meeting in person, and ignoring things happening too far away from them.
Staring at the sun today.Watching the eclipse today, reminded me about solar flares. I'd predict that a widespread solar flare that knocked out communication networks would probably leave us all a little happier than Covid. It would probably be very bad for some people, but we'd know less about those people.I hate the political angle on this. It feels leftist to me that “if we just had more schools/spent more money” we would not have “maga/disinformation problem” instead of most of things being fundamental disagreements.
That being said America is a vast country and a lot of Americans would benefit from getting to see more of it.
One of my own personal favorite trips was touring the gulf which has many unique places around it. It helped I had friends to see. But you get going thru their everything from old south (Pensacola for me), New Orleans it’s own animal, and Houston/small Texas towns to see a whole lot of culture and many different foods.
There are no doubt similar tours to be done that can take a couple weeks and involve 18 hrs or so of driving.
Agree that more Americans should see more of America. Pretty cool place. I feel like I've done most of my traveling in the last decade just attending weddings. My wife and I both have a lot of cousins. I did more travelling in college and just after college as part of an obscure rec-level sport club (underwater hockey, check it out and play it, my endorsement is worth op security concerns)
I am not feeling that this needs a political dimension. I think in general there are two axis of negotiation on any topic. One is the object level disagreement. And the other is a more nebulous social standing / social cohesion.
Take a simple example of where you want to go eat for dinner with a group of people. The object level concern is "what do I want to eat". If you are with people you care about and interact with regularly like your family, then you are definitely willing to go eat somewhere you don't like just to keep another person in that group happy, or make it clear that you might get later leverage on other things. Or you just love them and you want to make sure that they are happy.
Imagine you are instead going out with random strangers. They will eat at different tables, and you won't even know who they are. The nebulous social standing dimension / social cohesion negotiation space gets entirely erased. You have no reason except to advocate where you want to eat. And any compromise is a pure loss.
I think the bifurcation of America into rural vs urban has really destroyed the nebulous social dimension negotiating space. No one on either side is willing to compromise because its a pure loss for them and everyone they know. But if you stick them face to face with each other and get them to talk about politics you kind of reintroduce that nebulous social dimension.
Politics needs some grease to work. That grease is often the nebulous social dimension. Congress itself seems to partly work on these informal social dimensions. Politicians that only went after the objective political issues like Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders were semi-pariahs within congress. They often weren't useful in making deals, because they may as well have been robots.
What this exchange program does, what all exchange programs do is add some negotiating space.
When I went to India, I ended up liking my Indian coworkers better. It meant when it came time to schedule meetings that meant me waking up an hour earlier, I wasn't as annoyed with them. Because I knew it often meant staying an extra two hours for them. There were a bunch of minor effects like that. It added up to me being happier / better at interacting with India team members.
The student exchange program I went on middle school is now dead. Its an objectively bad way to spend money. Its basically subsidizing vacations for less well off PMC children that can figure out the hoops that need to be jumped through to participate. I think this American Exchange program might end up going the same way.
Buying the grease through an exchange program just seems way too expensive. Having the grease is pretty important though. They should probably just pay some popular youtubers or ticktockers to do lifestyle viewpoint videos on rural/urban people. Idk, I'm not smart enough to figure out an alternative.
Sometimes there isn't a cheap substitute. And, well, I sure think this is a better value-add than the various ideological projects already in schools (it's not negative, for one thing), and in the limit it costs less than a civil war would, so "expensive" is relative.
Hah, that is true!
Main problem with this would probably be scaling. Which is a problem with a lot of exchange programs. The value-add of exchange programs is often in a human element. So you need good host families, good host situations, and good candidates for an exchange. But you can't really manufacture those or spin them up at need. There is low hanging fruit to be picked when the program is small.
I remember my parents hosted an Italian exchange student for a half semester during my first year of college. They volunteered after the girl had request a home change. The girl had a good time staying with our family, but my parents never signed up for it again.
I stayed with a German family during my European trip, and I stayed in touch with them for a bit afterward. They were awesome, but I also don't think they ever hosted again.
My dad was friends with a married couple that couldn't have kids. They hosted maybe a dozen exchange students over the years. I think the kids that stayed with them had a mediocre time. They apparently had a lot of strict rules, which made sense for them hosting teenage girls for two decades in a row.
Not many data points, but I do feel that maybe some of the best experiences aren't gonna be easily replicable.
Something I just realized reading this is that while I'd love to host sometime, and think we would be a really good host family when the kids are older (we would take them to all the local archeological sites! To the historic plaza! To the pig slaughtering contest!), and have enough space, with an enormous spare room just sitting there, we will not have enough vehicle space, until the oldest is driving herself and can afford her own car, at which point it will probably be too late.
I've stayed as a young adult with a host family in the Republic of Georgia, and liked it a lot, but they have cheap van transportation, so I went off and made my own friends, and met up with them myself.
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