<HTML><HTML>That's right Wojtek. South Africans are more level headed and reasonable than Americans, all 40 million of the SA'ers, including the Afrikaners. One thing about those American males. They may be aggressive, loud and rude , but they are not racist. Not none of them, no sirree; that's just identity politics that racism stuff. It's like George Bush. He's loud and rude and aggressive (!), but he doesn't strike you as racist , does he ? CB From: Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol@jhu.edu> > Sorry to burst your bubble on this one, but you do get this phenomenon > in South Africa. Big time. But I'm not sure that it's aggression. It's > more like putting shiny mag wheels on your car or revving the engine of > your bike to attract attention, kind of like "Look at me I'm here". > Tahir Perhaps.  However, based on my experience S. African appear to me as level headed and reasoned people, even when they talk about apartheid. I had a conversation with a cab driver in Cape Town, as he was showing me different vestiges of the apartheid era 9separate this separate that) - and what stuck me was his matter of fact narration even when he made it clear what those vestiges meant to him (he was black, obviously).  I was quite impressed, because when I tried imagine myself in his shoes, the bitching and ranting would probably never end.  That was also my impression of other S. African I met - soft spoken but matter of fact. A sharp contrast with the the garbage that many US-ers put on the internet and public sphere. I do not hear many boomboxes, but that I guess is the matter when one goes (I did not go to the townships).  But I did not see many  boomboxes in Nairobi either and I did go the slums there.  As far as Europe is concerned, the thing that strikes most US visitors is how quiet they are comparing to the US cities - this is not just my observations, others observed that as well.  There was even a New Yorker cartoon: parent telling to their kid 'be quiet, we are in Europe." BTW noise making is an act of MALE passive aggression - you do not see many females revving their bike, blasting their boomoboxes etc. Wojtek </HTML>