An American Artifact Reflection

From writing this essay I really started to think about how American culture is different from other cultures. It's hard for me to define American culture because I've been so immersed in it my entire life, I don't know what's normal. In my essay I talked about the values of individualism, and freedom of choice and expression which are prevalant in America. But I'm not sure how much that's an American thing or just a human thing. I know that the US was founded on these values but are those foundations still embedded into our culture or have we become melded with the rest of the Western world? I did think about the difference between our culture and eastern cultures like China which are more focused on cooperation and where there isn't as much freedom, but still I'm not sure if thats a sign of America's culture being unusually free or China's culture being unusually strict.
After receiving feedback on this essay, I learned that I need to work on focusing my thoughts. I tend to spew out a lot of ideas as I'm writing, but then I need to spend the rest of my time reviewing what I've written and whittling down the different ideas to create a focused essay. I tend to get frustrated and tired once I've finished an essay so I don't spend much time proof reading or editing, but if I just spend a bit more time I can greatly improve my writing,