@newhuman: Haha - damn you :) Thank you for catching that. You are correct and I won't edit my dumb post. Of course I am NOT defending any ignorance, only explaining partly why this one example occurs so often with Americans, as an American interacting with other Americans, and as a result of a decade of witnessing people making fun of Americans about their shit world geography knowledge.
To defend Dan, sometimes people forget that the US is so big that even Americans often have little desire to memorize the geography of their own country and many of us barely leave our own state (love, work, school being the main reasons) as it's a huge deal to travel and there's not much point in terms of experiencing drastically different culture.
Europe has roughly as many countries as we have states but there's also more cultural impetus to experience them, generally. So Americans do tend to think more locally, for some of these reasons. It's also why the concept of a "road trip" is typically American - it's the "F it, I'm out - gonna see some stuff" panic attack we experience.
Generally though, from an early age you just sorta stop caring about borders, cities, states, whatever, unless you have an interest in a specific parts of the world, or where sales tax is lower, or where the school you want to go to is, or where your gf/bf lives, or where your new job is.
I'm not defending ignorance at all, absolutely not, just trying to explain why many Americans suck at world geography and borders. We live in a country full of boring ones. When I used to drive home from school it would be six hours at 70mph/112kph and four states and I barely could tell when I passed from one to the other.
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