Ethnocentrism

In Chapter 12, we talked about lots of different way of intercultural communication. I had a very hard time picking one that stood out to me but I think I would have to say that Ethnocentrism is something that really stuck out to me as different. Ethnocentrism is the belief that one's own culture is superior to all others and the tendency to judge all cultures by one's own criteria.I agree with the book when it says that this is not a productive attitude. No one should think that there culture is better than the next. I have been lucky enough to travel a lot and see how people can react to different cultures. I remember when I was living in Europe, people thought that they were better than Americans more often than not. They had this attitude that we are dumb because of so many different reason and one in particular was George Bush. It really makes me sad that people are so weary to try and figure different kind of people out and why in their culture they do things differently than maybe we do. In France it is illegal to work more than 40 hours in a week. They pride themselves off that in there time off they make time to relax, spend time with family and friends and enjoy life. In America we don't necessarily think it is as important to sit down as a family every night and talk about our day and we might think that the french are lazy and we pride ourselves off of how much much we work. You can agree with one way more than the other but I think that it is so special that we have so many different cultures in the world. My question to the world, Why would we not embrace all of them?