We Need to Make Globes Mandatory

In the Tuesday, July 18 edition of the NY Times, President Bush is reported to have engaged in a conversation with Hu Jintao of China about their respective trips home from a summit in Russia. According to the Times, Bush was anxious to get on the road because of the long distance he had to travel but commented to Jintao "This is your neighborhood; it won't take you long to get home."

President Bush illustrated here just how skewed American perspectives on geographical distance are when thinking of the rest of the world. In reality, the time Bush would take to get home was almost exactly the same as that of Jintao. Before we moved to Asia and still today, I struggled with distances and putting them into a real perspective. I suspect that part of our problem comes from American media, which sometimes portrays developing parts of the world as specks on the map, creating closeness in our minds which masks long distances and great cultural heterogeneity.

Have you studied a globe lately?

How Quickly We've Forgotten

This week I had dinner with an old friend from my day's at the Community Center in Kansas City, Sally, and found myself as usual humbled, amazed, and laughing at our conversation. Sally is to this day the most PFLAG mom-ish woman that I've ever had the chance to meet personally, but in no way is she a stereotype. After graduating from school, Sally moved to Chicago in the 1950s and worked as a teacher. She shared with me over dinner the experience of being a single woman moving into the city at that time and the implicit assumption that existed even by the 50's that if a single woman in the city was synonymous with being a prostitute. She wasn't able to rent an apartment by herself or under her name, and ended up living in an apartment block for single women, before getting an apartment with a girlfriend after her father signed the lease. Lucky for her, her dad was a reverend.

I try to remember it to keep myself sane as we feel hemmed in by purchasing bureaucracy. I try to remember it to show how quickly things can improve but also how easily hardships can be forgotten. Part of me is excited by that and part saddened, as I think my generation easily forget the remarkable transformations that have occurred in the lives of women, just as we continue live with the transformations that haven't materialized to the same degree. Poverty and race remain aspects of our society which divide and challenge our prospects for progress. Also in conversation with Sally, I was reminded of the great challenges of those without education (formal and practical) in life as she described in her words the high cost of being poor. Being somewhat transient now, I recognize somewhat these costs but know that it is nearly impossible for me to comprehend them. There are parts and aspects of the United States which feel more mysteriously frustrating and incomprehensible to me than anything I gleamed in our time abroad.