It's A Small World After All

It’s a Small World After All

This weekend Centenary College hosts Ten Thousand Villages. A shopping event which brings together “over 100 artisans in more than 30 countries,” like Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have witnessed an incredible shrinking of the world. Modern technology enables communication across the world in a matter of seconds. Cell phones, high speed jets, e-mail and the internet have made letter writing and horse and wagons a symbol of ancient history. In fact, most of the youth of America cannot remember a time when the internet did not exist.

Although Americans have so many tools to bring the world at large into their backyard it seems the people of the United States have self-inflicted tunnel vision. Americans live daily with no awareness of what is happening in other cultures, in other nations, on other continents, and even on our own continent. Today more than ever, people have the ability to identify with one another despite our diversity, and yet we choose to associate only with those who are familiar and safe in our lives. What is responsible for the nonchalant attitudes of Americans? Much of the world believes it to be arrogance, greed and selfishness.

The European Union is proof of a new world ideology. Europeans have been working diligently for over a half a century to bring the new EU together, unified by common goals and driven for peace and a chance to claim themselves as a rising world power. Much of the desire to become a superpower is the chance to usurp America at the top. The majority of Europeans and European governments today perceive America as a threat: a threat toward the peace of the world and a self-destructive bully willing to take anyone on in a fight. Although America is one of the wealthiest countries of the world the people of the United States are ignorant and nationalistic.

As Centenary students pass through Ten Thousand Villages, an ingrained culture may keep some American purses closed tightly. Although the world in 2007 is smaller than it ever has been before the distance across the Atlantic and the many waves in the Pacific oceans are farther and wider than ever before.