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?
No comments:
Post a Comment