How to actually benefit one's culture

In recent years there has been an interest among many people in defending or supporting their cultures. This is a potentially positive direction; however most directions taken have been wrong.As someone who has been a cultural contributor both to Russian and to American cultures, I can state with clarity what adding to one's culture is - and what it is not.

It is not beating up on people from other cultures. Whether it be skinheads beating up on blacks and Hispanics or Russians beating up on Jews, this does nothing to improve one's culture and does much to discredit it and make it look in the worst positive light.

It is not keeping out influences from other cultures. This does nothing but create censorship - censorship that is in contradiction to the freedom that is promised by one's country and that is a vast part of its cultural legacy. A genuine cultural contributor does not keep away influences from other cultures. He respects them for what they are and then does them one better. The cultures grow in large part through incorporation of foreign influences; and nowhere is this more true than in America, which has grown by incorporating influences from around the world, and Russia, which has grown by incorporating both European and Asian influences.

So what does it actually mean to benefit one's culture? It is to add work that is good enough that it adds to one's culture - work that the people within the culture can look at with pride, and that people from other cultures can look upon respectfully. It is to produce - art, poetry, literature, film - that adds to the wisdom, the beauty and the intelligence that has come out from one's culture. And thus it is to grow one's culture while allowing others to grow theirs, resulting in cultural growth and improvement across the board.

And doing that does far more to benefit one's culture and one's country than the actions of any number of thugs, who do nothing in the end for their culture except making its participants look like barbarians while adding nothing to its accomplishment and its legacy.