When Americans see something that is not fair, they react powerfully to the unfairness. I think I saw it almost everyday growing up in the New York, New Jersey area. I think that the basic level of fairness goes through the whole country, but up there, New Yorkers can be so lippy, so mouthy, so in your face that fairness is more pronounced.
When we moved to Kansas back in the 80’s people were a touch kinder, maybe quite a bit kinder and it took them longer to object to unfairness. I didn’t like the kindness so much because it masked how people really felt. Growing up in that eastern environment, you knew where you stood and you knew what people thought about you or various subjects. That was real to me and moving to the midwest kind of threw me for a while.
Midwesterners had their own way of voting for fairness I would say. I’m still trying to figure it out after some 30 years out here, but basically they don’t say much but they get a touch passive aggressive, withdrawing their support over time. Up there, they tell you to your face that they don’t like you, out here, they tell it to someone else that they don’t like you. To be fair, both happen in both places, but I think what I’ve described is largely accurate.
I say this to point out that fairness is more or less universal in these United States. The response to unfairness may be different or nuanced, but there is a response. And the country may be balancing out anyhow. Cut in line at the supermarket and you're likely to get an ear full back east or out west.
My main thought as I write this is that much of our Social posts are about unfairness. Some one did not win at an event because the refs were bad, or someone was tossed out of the game on a technicality. There are dozens of other fairness stories, I won’t describe them, maybe safer that way. But we have a phenomena in this country that has always been there but is currently in full beast mode.
We set ourselves up as judge and often jury for just about every event that takes place. This has been true for many decades, but today, we have far more cases to judge. Every day, some new unfairness occurs and we are ready to collect the facts, the evidence and render a judgment and a verdict.
Nevermine that we are lousy detectives and almost never do any really investigation or research into the matter, we sure know how to arrive at a conclusion and a judgment. It’s a rush to judgment on steroids. And we are hanging a lot of innocent people. And we are proving ourselves unfit to judge on so many matters. We could use a heavy dose of Judging school. Real American Fairness depends on it.