Cuftural Benefits for a public speaker

Several generations ago, if you listened to the radio (in those days before television) or read magazines, you would find one striking assumption: America was the best of all possible worlds. This attitude typified ethnocentrism, the tendency of any nation, race, or religion to believe that its way of seeing and doing things is right and proper, and that other perspectives and behaviors are incorrect. Ethnocentrism can touch everything from the clothes we wear and the food we eat to the values we affirm and the God we worship.
Clearly, ethnocentrism is a human, not an American. But we Americans certainly have our share of it. Forty years ago, Richard M. Weaver, a noted conservative critic of communication, suggested:
The Western World has long stood as a symbol for the future; and accordingly there has been a very wide tendency in this country, and also I believe among many people in Europe, to identify that which is American with that which is destined to be… . [To them] America is the goal toward which all creation moves. . . . [They] judge a country’s civilization by its resemblance to the American model.
In the first half of this century, the “melting pot” was a popular metaphor that expressed this attitude about American culture. This theory suggested that as various ethnic and national groups came to this country, they would be blended and melted down in some vast cultural cauldron into a superior alloy called “the American Character.” The idea assumed that all who came to our shores would be forged into a powerful new unity. In addition, the “melting pot” metaphor reinforced ethnocentrism and cultural arrogance—to be American was to be better.