A few stereotypes about Americans include being loud, stupid, and eating a lot of junk food. These are all learned behaviors and a product of a wide variety of circumstances. Take the junk food as an example. Fast food came around as a quick alternative to sit-in dining or cooking your own meals. The people that work in these restaurants are providing “unskilled labor”, so company owners don’t have to pay them as much or give them benefits. This guarantees that they will always have a market of people in need of cheap food, a market that will only continue to grow as CEO’s use their money to boot out healthier competitors. Americans are complacent with this, and so many other issues that other countries have solved while we shake our heads and say “that’s just the way it is”, or worse, turn up our noses at these solutions for being “Un-American” (making us seem stupid). I’m sure other countries find us very difficult to deal with. We don’t bother learning other languages, we keep inserting ourselves into other country’s conflicts without fixing our own problems, and yet we have all this money, power and influence. It must be infuriating.