Kultur2

To the right, is an picture of an actual poster that I found on MSU campus.

(I like to think that it pretty accurately reflects the life of an MSU student, but that's besides the point)

The point is that the "Germanic stare down" article reminded me about this picture. Many of the descriptions in this article I found to be very humorous and almost difficult to imagine. "Maybe the perpetrators have just never lived in New York, where prolonged eye contact can result in a messy homicide" is right. Eye contact in America is a very different thing. Everyone has experienced the brief moment of panic when you are caught glancing at a stranger's eyes for too long, or sometimes even a friend's. It's more of an unspoken rule than anything, but it happens almost on a daily basis.

The other scenario, where the person is watching you to make sure you follow the rules, also kind of "jumped out" at me. The article described how this was very historical, that communist Germany used its own citizens as internal spys and reported any unusual activity to the Staatssicherheit. In the Nazi class that I took last semester, we learned how the same place took place a decade before the "Stasi" was formed. Nazi Germany used the Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police), commonly known as the Gestapo, to monitor its citizens from the inside. I found it very interesting that not only has it happened repeatedly in the past, it still happens today! Albeit to a lesser extent, but still.