“Life outside can’t be trashed and made to look worse than it is. And life inside can’t be propagandized and made to look better than it is. Thanks to the democratization of information, we all increasingly know how each other lives – no matter how isolated you think a country might be.”
- Thomas Friedman (The Lexus and the Olive Tree - Pg.67, paragraph 3)
********Post provided by B. Jefferson*********
From CNN to the homepages of Yahoo and AOL, it seems that we are always being updated with not just the happening of our own country, but the happenings of the world. Whether it be giant sink holes in South America or protests in Cairo, Egypt, today's mass information system allows us to get a glimpse of what is underneath the superficial front that so many countries try to uphold. Unfortunately, this uncovering is universal; this also means that other countries are able to see past our superficialities as well. I think this is what Thomas Friedman described in his book The Lexus and The Olive Tree, when he wrote, “Life outside can’t be trashed and made to look worse than it is. And life inside can’t be propagandized and made to look better than it is. Thanks to the democratization of information, we all increasingly know how each other lives – no matter how isolated you think a country might be.”
Over the past year or so I have come to wonder if being globally aware is a two-edged sword. Yes, people need to know that other countries have it worse than us and our constant debate over our “liberties” and, yes, we also need to be aware that some countries run more effectively and have procedures that we can learn from and implement to be more effective. For example, we are currently going through a healthcare reform. What can we learn from other countries that can help us make the best reforms possible? Should we follow what Switzerland does and make policy so that everyone has to buy insurance, instead of receiving it as a benefit from their jobs, and make it so that health insurance companies compete which in turn will drive down cost? Or, should we maybe follow Austria’s example and have everyone pay into the healthcare system? The price that each citizen pays into the system will be determined by their income, because let’s face it, if we, the people of middle class America, can buy a new IPhone, IPad, or 62’ flat screen TV, and are using the excuse that “healthcare is expensive”, we are being irresponsible. The money we spend on fancy gadgets could have paid for our healthcare or better yet, our children’s healthcare.
The problem that I have with this new sense of global awareness is that, unfortunately, there are many people in our country who can tell you the political structure of the Middle East and what they need to do to sustain “democracy”, along with people who can tell you exactly what caused the riots in Greece and how the people were trying to effect change in the Grecian government. And yet these people cannot even begin to examine some of the key discussions concerning what we need, as Americans, to manifest the future which we truly desire.
Ultimately, I fear that the very information that links us together with the world and allows us to think past our superficial understandings of what happens in different parts of the country could cause us to down play what happens in our own. For instance what are we doing to make our future generations more competitive? Have we made it easier for our children to get quality education? Or, are we making it more difficult to give them the tools that they need to succeed? Are we creating viable jobs for our children or are we outsourcing everything we can to technology and other countries? Lastly, and more importantly, I daresay that we are not holding our government accountable for its actions and not holding ourselves accountable for thinking that we are blameless in the doings of our government considering that, cough, we participate in a democracy. I hope to see you at the polls, whatever your position is -politically- in the coming months as we move through election season.
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