What’s up with us Westerners?

"Man, they rebuked me in Bangladesh!"

I was sitting in the kitchen at the school where I am an instructor. I was reading to my colleagues from the many comments I had received for my last piece of writing.

"Wow! The reaction, it's so… visceral!" My fellow teacher replied. "What's up with Bangladesh?"

That question struck me. The question was meant as a criticism, yet in it, I saw an attitude that said more about the speaker than about the intended target of her question. I have quoted my friend, Mi'Kmaq Native American Kenneth Little Hawk who tells my children, "when you point a finger, three point back at you."

I immediately recalled the conference, back in October, which I attended with a professor friend of mine. The academics assumed a universal political accord, and went as far as to speak of Conservatism in the United States as a mania, or a psychological illness.

"What's up with Conservatives?" They asked, never realising how close minded their own response had been.

You, My Dear Readers, responded in force to last week's article. I have never felt so inspired by people who disagreed with me to, well, not necessarily to re-examine my moral point of view, but to question my motivations for expressing my ideas on certain subjects.

I know I inspired the ire of many people on one side of a particular debate, so perhaps this week I can succeed in making the other side angry.

See, I'm not used to being paid attention as a writer. In the long and not often glorious history of my career as a writer, I have been rejected by countless publishers, ignored by scores of literary decision-makers, and often shrugged off by my reading audience.

This was mostly my fault.

Mostly, I say, but not entirely. People in the West, like me, have been conditioned to write in sound bytes. The incessant flow of information necessitates that we sacrifice our long-winded explanations in order to maintain the attention of our readership. In the West, we must "spin" things in one sentence or less. We use catchphrases like "Human rights" and leave the in-depth analysis, even the thinking to the experts.

So when I write, I write as an American. We Americans, unlike our British counterparts, have historically been poor occupiers. This is because we don't have the same sense of social hierarchy that Europeans have. The British weren't so much interested in doing business as they were in superimposing themselves as yet another tier in a nation's social strata, and to rule from above. Our imperialists aimed at the merchant class, and always attempted (and continues to attempt) to market to the popular culture until it is homogenized into our system and becomes completely recognizable to us. We care less about our generals having tea with local royalty than we do about teenagers wearing our T-shirts.

So for the British, occupation meant bureaucracy croquet and cricket. For us in America, it means McDonald's, Mormons, and Lady Gaga.

I remember noticing a McDonald's across from the Pantheon in Rome. I thought of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's speech, "the world must be safe for democracy". We liberated Rome in the late 1940s. More than 70 years later, we occupy it still.

And at what price? Must all cultural identity dissipate in the name of free trade and Western notions of democracy? My article last week dealt with that issue that has deep currency for me here. However, as I perused the many comments, I noticed one reader who took the time to remind us all that Hillary Clinton had called for the universal recognition of rights that may run contrary to the cultural and religious beliefs of entire swaths of the Earth's population.

Aren't such declarations as imperialistic as the Mormon missions of Mitt Romney's youth? Are we building our moral McDonald's across from the venerated symbolic hearts of the world's unique cultures? And, as another writer pointed out, what of the deeper issues that Ms. Clinton and the West in general seem to conveniently ignore? It occurred to me that no one in the West was talking about the cattle herders who cross the Indian borders but are too poor to pay the bribes. Ms. Clinton has nothing to say about the Bangladeshis who live upstream of the dam projects in India. Where is the outcry from the West that all people of Bangladesh would welcome universally?

Please know that my heart and my intentions were in the right place, as perhaps the McDonald's executives and Ms. Clinton's are, when they speak of such things from our American perspective. So the question for me this week – I am no different than those who come to your shores with a missionary zeal? Am I seeing something "broken" that needs to be fixed from a Western point of view? I begin to believe that conversations like I started should only be initiated from within Bangladesh itself.

So I humbly submit to you that perhaps some other questionable Western ideas have encroached upon your shore in the name of progress. The construction of roads for instance, where perhaps canals would make more sense, the structure of the educational system, the embracing of the pursuit of material wealth. I offer these as abstract for instances, not as concrete examples. I'm merely citing possible areas in which uniquely Bangladeshi solutions may look nothing like what we do here in the West. Many areas must exist where it would behove Bangladeshis to ask what their country would look like without the encroachment of colonizing ideas, past and present.

Of course, if you all were to reject foreign ideas completely, I would be out of a job, and that would be a shame for me because of your virtues, you all seem to read more carefully and write more voluminously in English than my American readers ever have.

The larger debate that evolved from the input of my readers was whether or not the right of nations to define themselves culturally should trump the right of individuals to express themselves, though they counter the cultural norm. Maybe one answer can be found in a comment that another reader made. There is room for the alternative lifestyle here in America, just like there's room in our strip malls for another McDonald's. Perhaps our immigration policies should be geared toward protecting the very civil rights that we are interested in promoting, and we should never interfere with the cultural development of another nation. Much of the outrage I gleaned from my article focused not so much on my ideas themselves, but on the fact that I was a Westerner proposing these ideas. As an American, even when I agree with the criticism of my nation, I often bristle when such criticism is offered by Europeans. It's natural that you all had a similar reaction.

So what's up with the West? Our policies all indicate that we choose the easiest of human rights battles. We abandon allies like Taiwan because China will make us richer, while we steadfastly support Israel, right or wrong. We turn a blind eye to dictators because we are afraid of the economic impact that liberty will have on consumers back home. My intention was slightly different, I saw my article on the issue of homosexuality as an attempt to bridge gaps between families. In doing so, I opened up a very large can of worms.

The ugly and wonderful thing about free speech is that people get to hear what they love and what they hate. Dialogue, rather than silence, helps to resolve all issues. So although I was rebuked by so many in Bangladesh, I am still grateful for the lessons that it taught me and the conversations it inspired here in the United States. We in the West must do better in terms of cultural sensitivity when we speak of human rights. I believe in what I said, but perhaps I should've left it to a Bangladeshi to say it.

What's up with Frank?

Not sure, but he will certainly continue to allow his writing to be formed, and informed by the sincere opinions of those individuals who take the time to either support, or politely attempt to correct his viewpoint. In the process, at least he can guarantee that he will build no McDonald's on your shores.

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Frank Domenico Cipriani writes a weekly column in the Riverside Signal called "You Think What You Think And I'll Think What I Know." He is also the founder and CEO of The Gatherer Institute — a not-for-profit public charity dedicated to promoting respect for the environment and empowering individuals to become self-taught and self-sufficient. His most recent book, "Learning Little Hawk's Way of Storytelling", teaches the native art of oral tradition storytelling.