There Goes the Neighborhood

So this week's topic is what happens when two cultures meet. Usually it ends badly. Some examples are when we colonized America. When Columbus and his crew came to America, they brought along diseases that the Native Americans did not develop immunities to like the Europeans did, some examples that I just googled being smallpox, bubonic plague, typhus, mumps, influenza, yellow fever, and measles. These deseases killed off almost half of the Native American population. On top of these diseases, when the Spaniards colonized the Americas, they also made the Native Americans their slaves. But most of the Native Americans were dying or weakened from European diseases so the Spaniards had to find other people to do the work required to uphold a colony. Obviously, they turned to African people, which is another example of how things can go badly when two cultures meet. They were taken from their homes, forced into slave ships, and sent to a destination to be sold. In America, slavery wasn't abolished until...................September 22, 1862. It doesn't always end so badly though. Last summer, I moved into an almost all-Latino neighborhood (I'm asian). It also wasn't a good neighborhood either, I can hear my neighbor swearing a lot, a guy asked me if I knew how to roll weed, and my dad's car got stolen. So obviously our cultures were very different, and I wouldn't want to be outside a lot. The way I coped with it was that I just took the bus to my old neighborhood to hang out or just walked a couple of blocks to Subway's to get food. So one way to have a mixture of cultures without it ending badly is to just ignore each other, which is pretty much what I did.