ItSeemstoMe

I am a Globalist

A thought came to me sometime today.  I am a globalist. Not in the sense of favoring huge, multinational corporate powerhouses, although I have no inherent problem with them as such.  But I am a globalist in terms of people. As a blogger, I speak with people in three, occasionally four continents every week and I just love it.  I love seeing how much we have in common on so many levels.

There's a combination of factors that have been going on this week, all kind of blending together into this thought.  I've been reading Thomas L. Friedman's marvelous The World is Flat. An elderly Jewish person I care about is growing uncomfortable with the influx of Afghani Muslims and Indian Hindus into her neighborhood. A guy in front of me in the bakery line told me that all of America's problems could be solved if we built walls around our borders to keep all outsiders, well, out.  A client was telling me about the amazing transformations going in Bangalore.  My friend Ivan let me know that the Singapore Library system would be buying 22 copies of my book.  My email repeatedly failed to reach a friend in China who had voiced objections to the government's suppression of a blogger. A pair of Christian evangelists came to my door, and when I told them that I was Jewish they smiled and said we're all God's children, when I suspect they thought I was really destined to burn in Hell.

I am a globalist, because I feel kinship with people all over the world. Because we share similar ethics, interests, passions, knowledge.  Sometimes I don't feel that kinship with my own neighbors. I think one of the great miracles of the Internet and blogosphere is that we can find people we share kinships with all over the world--at least if their governments don't get in the way.

I may not ever belong in a business larger than my home office can accommodate, which means my wife, my dog, cat and myself, but I have truly become a globalist.

China's Cute Internet Cops

Once again through Rebecca MacKinnon, comes a story of how China is intimidating Internet users to keep in line. A south China city introduces to lovable cartoon cops to let people see the police are watching citizens as closely online as they do offline.

Questions to the World #19-World Peace

Question # 19

How do you think we can achieve peace on Earth andor good will toward humankind?

More Holiday Nostalgia

Elana Centor at Funny Business posted a great comment on my earlier post on a Jew's View of Christmas. Elana, obviously a Bagel Sister, talked about flashbacks of the New Jersey Turnpike whenever she hears the Little Drummer Boy relentlessly on the radio. I too am haunted by memories of the New Jersey Turnpike, whenever I hear that redundant rumpa-bum-bum. y now the little drummer kid is probably 180 years old, but that's another story.

I got stranded by a blizzard, one Christmas Eve, with college buddies trying t make it to Florida for school vacation.  It pelted snow so hard, they closed the road and we spent most of the night drinking coffee in a jammed roadside restaurant.  The Drummer just played over-and-over again.

But Elana's touch into my memory bank touched another chord, one I've been thinking about a lot lately.  Driving to Florida were four kids, two Jewish, one Protestant and one Catholic.  In those days, we kidded each other a lot about each other's religion or lack of it. It was delivered-and received-in good fun back in the early 60s.

It was Like that growing up in New Bedford, Mass., in the 1950s as well. We used to have interfaith dances, at our Jewish Community Center, the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO)annex and the local YMCA. Some of the best times of my youth were spent with buddies and sports team-mates of different religion.  Some of the most exciting moments of my youth were spent with Christian girls in the back seats of those wonderfully large cars of the 1950s, but that too, is another story.

In all of it, there was a lot of kidding  But there was a special shared respect.  We went t each other's homes. I went to Midnight Mass several years in a row on Christmas Eve, after getting into my friend Robert Pacheco's family's spike eggnog.  t was an annual high point. The Catholic kids joked about confession and we joked about our own fire and brimstone Rabbi. We were kids.  We came from homes where both parents worked and the mortgage got paid but no one got ahead. We had more in common with each other than we did with the so called leaders of our religious communities.

But two things happened. We grew up for one, and as we did so, the world around us seemed to have become far less ecumenical and even further less tolerant. A lot us went off to college, nearly all being the first of their families to do so. Those who did not stayed in New Bedford.  They remained good friends with each other but the rest of us moved on and scattered.

I'm still interfaith in my friendships.  I'm still convinced that people of varied races, religions and hues are essentially alike at the core, but unfortunately separated by cultures. Ad cultures everywhere seem to me today more entrenched is staying separated than they were when I was hanging out with the guys outside Finni's Pharmacy on Roche Street in New Bedford, Mass.

I am currently living a better life than I have ever had. But in the sense that the ecumenism's, which so shared the attitudes I have today seems to me to be on the wane, and this time of year, it makes me particularly sad.

But in any case, Elana, thanks for the memory flashback.

Finding Humans on 800 Lines

Hellerman directs us to Paul English's cheat sheet for navigating through corporate voice processing to actually reaching a human. Hellerman calls it the most useful thing he has found on the web. I think that's only a slight exageration. I for one am tired of hearing how important my call is to people who won't speak to me.

Question to the World #6

What do you most like about where you live? What could be better?

Questions to the World #4

I'm going to run with these questions for a while. I believe if enough people join in and answer enough of these questions over a period of time, the results will tell us something about what similarities and differences people have. I almost never ask for links, but if you find this effort interesting, please spread the word, encourage others to come. I want diversity in every way that wird is used. Question #4 What or who do you trust?

Questions to the World #1

We bloggers love to tell the world what we think.  Collectively, we are sort of this humungous global op ed page, with opinions spilling into all sorts of stuff. It dawned on me that it might be interesting to turn it around and ask the world what it thinks.

So, I'm going to start asking open-ended questions, one at a time. I am not going to enter my thoughts.  I am not going to comment on yours. You can tell us as much or as little about yourself as you wish, so long as you do not respond anonymously or in excessively bad taste. Your comments will endure in the blogosphere from this point forward.

Over time, I hope to have some very lengthy commentary.  I haven't a clue what it will prove or disclose--but here goes with my first question to the world:

From where you are, what do you think the world will look like ten years from today?