The Global Village

In the Ray Bradbury short story The Meadow, there is a brilliant spiel about the smallness of the world. A character is walking around a film set, where different world cities back onto others on different soundstages – you walk through a door in one and pop out onto another. The character tries to explain to a man who wants to destroy them, that the whole thing is connected, thus:

 “… you got Boston joined to Trinidad … part of Trinidad poking out of Lisbon, part of Lisbon leaning on Alexandria, Alexandria tacked onto Shanghai, and a lot of little pegs and nails in between, like Chattanooga, Oshkosh, Oslo, Sweet Water, Soissons, Beirut, Bombay, and Port Arthur. You shoot a man in New York and he stumbles forward and drops dead in Athens. You take a political bribe in Chicago and somebody in London goes to jail. You hang a Negro man in Alabama and the people of Hungary have to bury him. The dead Jews of Poland clutter the streets of Sydney, Portland, and Tokyo. You push a knife into a man’s stomach in Berlin and it comes out the back of a farmer in Memphis.”

This week, my faith in humanity blossomed somewhat as, for a change, we stopped being American or British or Spanish or Italian or Libyan or Australian or Egyptian or Chilean. Like the people in that short story, we saw the world for the small place that it is, and realised that we have to look at the bigger picture and perhaps even if we cannot do anything about the problems in other countries, we at least can let them know that they are not forgotten, prove that we do care.

In New Zealand, one of the country’s worst earthquakes of modern times shook the ground, killing at least ninety-eight people. The USA and UK wasted little time in sending out search and rescue teams to help with finding survivors and beginning the clean-up operation, which will include working out what to do with the many destroyed buildings, including the beautiful Christchurch Cathedral.

Meanwhile, in northern Africa, things took a turn for the worse. In Tunisia, we cheered as the protestors won, and then again as after eighteen days and 350 dead, Egypt too managed to get rid of their tyrannical dictator. So Libya thought it would have a go.

In just two days, over 400 people were dead, shot with bullets so large they literally rip people apart. While the Western governments remained worryingly silent, the Internet came into its own. My usual haunts, in particular including Tumblr and, of course, Twitter, were full of outrage, of passing on important messages, of people refusing to keep quiet and spreading every last detail they found out.

Perhaps we’re doing nothing to help – indeed, I don’t know what help we can give to Libya – but there was something so wonderful about the whole thing. Like I said, we stopped looking at ourselves as being defined by our nations and looked at ourselves as humans. They suffered and we tried to feel their pain, although we would never be able to.

Recently, I’ve begun to feel that the world is crumbling down around my ears. All great empires end … perhaps the Human Empire, the global village, has finally begun to lose it.

The invention of the Internet is, I feel, mostly to “blame” for this feeling that we are part of something bigger. We can now connect to anyone else on the planet and these countries are closer now than they have ever been. Sadly, with every village comes village idiots, and our global village is no different.

I have seen messages of hate online, messages from people with no sympathy and no understanding and, I would presume from this, no education. One springs to mind of people who had left comments on a blog about the Australian flooding. They were Americans, telling the Australians to “get over it”, and that the threats of terrorism their country faced were far greater than the suffering of their (supposedly) allied country. Disgusting.

In some cases, the media, too, is full of village idiots. While people are being blown apart in Libya, there are some websites dedicating their time to Justin Bieber’s haircut. Do you get that? In the choice between dedicating their headlines to genocide or the fact that a teenager got a haircut, they’ve gone with that ever relevant topic: HAIR GROWS, THIS GUY HAS FOUND A WAY TO STOP IT!

In all of this, the politicians seem to remain idiotic too. I know there is nothing they can do personally to step in and stop Libyan military killing the civilians, or indeed stop earthquakes in New Zealand, but let’s look at the facts. They were quite happy to stumble into a war with Iraq when a dictator was ruling over there, but Tunisia? Libya? Egypt? Not a thing. In fact, these are supposedly some of our allies – our former colonies. Why did we not feel it appropriate to try and save these people?

Am I being cynical or is it because these people pose an actual threat? After all, have we seen any evidence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction yet, after all these years? Did that war not all begin around the same time that Osama bin Laden organised the 9/11 attacks? Let’s not forget that Saddam had nothing to do with that? Or is the whole thing, dare I say, about oil and resources? Iraq has a lot of oil, but Osama’s Pakistan does not, so what was the point of invading them? So is the same true of north Africa? Maybe Tunisia, Libya and Egypt had nothing for us to take, so we had nothing to gain from helping the oppressed people of these countries. (I’ve just done a bit of research for once – Libya does have oil, but Italy takes most of it, while the UK and USA don’t take much).

It seems hard to deny these days that every country appears to be facing breaking point, with the world’s economy in tatters and protests across the world every other week. Even factors beyond our control – earthquakes, hurricanes, floods – seem to be worsening, almost as if Mother Nature herself has had enough and wants us gone. We cannot be expected to help everyone all the time we keep viewing ourselves as different.

Those being killed in Libya, those suffering in New Zealand, those celebrating in Egypt and those clearing up after the floods in Australia. They are us. They are not some other species, they are humans like me and you and David Cameron and Barack Obama, and the world needs to start working together if it has any hope of getting out of the next century, let alone the next millennium, because the world is now so small that everything we do resonates in every corner of the globe.

The quotation I used to open this blog continues, and I shall use that continuation to end:

 “It’s all so close, so very close. That’s why we have peace here. We’re all so crowded that there has got to be peace, or nothing would be left! One fire would destroy all of us, no matter who started it, for what reason. So all of the people, the memories, whatever you will call them, that are here, have settled down, and this is their world, a good world, a fine world.”

Maybe we all need to think about that a little more and begin to work together, no matter how hard that might look for now. It is not an impossible dream. It is possible if we just learn a little respect.

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