Ran.Dom said:
Because americans have to do everything differently. Especially when it makes no sense and pisses everyone else off.
Its just part of their culture.
You know, Australians do things differently and no one throws venom at them like they do at Americans. Australians have Australian rules football that doesn't look like soccer. Canadians, too.
Everybody does there own thing. No need to stress about it. England uses stones to measure people's weight, and have a measurement for men's shoes that no one else uses either. I don't insult them about it.
It just is what it is. There are historical and cultural reasons and that is what makes the world and interesting place. If we were all the same it would get boring.
And lastly, to be honest, the US doesn't think enough about the rest of the world to base its decisions on what would upset everyone else. One of the side-effects of being separated from everybody else by two oceans and being provincial is that we don't tend to do things to upset Europeans, we don't tend to think about Europeans much at all (except when we want to go on and on about how exciting the royals are). I don't think it is a good thing we are so provincial (especially paired with the huge impact with have on the rest of the world), but we honestly don't do things just because we want to upset other people or because we feel we have to everything differently. We really aren't that spiteful of a country. On the downside, we also tend to charge into places in order to "help" without a lot of cultural sensitivity or knowledge of what those other places have going on.
Think of us as a good-natured, very creative, but really self-centered teenager (as teenagers tend to be), who is a super beefy football/rugby player and is prone to knocking things over because he or she doesn't pay as much attention as he or she should. But when European countries were 250 years old, they weren't all that different.
