The World is Flat

 (From my archive. This is an excerpt from an essay I published in 2010.)

Each big change that sweeps through your life, especially of the losing kind (losing a job, a relationship, a house) creates a grieving period but also opens up new possibilities for your future.

This is obvious, of course, and I am not a self-help guru, so I won't condescend to anyone by offering cliches about how to deal with such situations.

But I will note that, in my case, when someone takes something away from me (typically a job), after I'm sad and perhaps mad for a bit, I reach the stage where I feel that a burden has been lifted.

Upon reflection, somebody paid me to do something, told me what to do and how to do it, indicated displeasure but rarely pleasure -- you know the routine — and now all that is gone from my life.

In American business culture, it seems, kindness is a lost art. The idea is to be direct.

The world is changing for middle-class Americans. Our position of relative privilege in the world is flattening out as we increasingly integrate our economy with the emerging global system. It’s called globalization.

There are some who would use our power, including our military power, to resist this adjustment in relative privilege. They believe we have a God-given right to being "number one" and other people should not be allowed to catch up unless they do so at no cost to us.

It doesn't work that way. The world as we know it is a finite place. There are only so many resources. They have to go around, according to some sort of system of equity, or monstrous disparities will persist between the rich and the poor.

There are those who defend such disparities and would fight to the death (or send others to their death) in order to defend them.

Not me. I recognize that my relative wealth is directly related to a larger world of poverty, illness, and shortened expectations. I am grateful to be an American, but I’d like to think we could be better global citizens.

But the political discourse over these matters has become so poisoned that I have trouble enduring it. Let’s hope the situation improves soon.

P.S. It didn’t.

HEADLINES:

• Senate dismisses two articles of impeachment against Homeland Security secretary, ends trial (AP)

• A self-described "Christian nationalist" who served in Trump's administration said his former boss is "cloaking" his actual, "radical" beliefs on the campaign trail, adding that he would govern in a "more aggressive fashion" if he won a second term. [HuffPost]

• Surreal scenes as jurors in New York trial tell Trump what they really think (Guardian)

• Other states, like Arizona, could resurrect laws on abortion, LGBTQ+ issues and more that have been lying dormant for more than 100 years (The Conversation)

• Finally, Mike Johnson Makes His Move to Shiv Marjorie Taylor Greene (New Republic)

• Secret Russian foreign policy document urges action to weaken the U.S. (WP)

• Reformers hoped to curtail US domestic spying; lawmakers are poised to expand it (Reuters)

• NPR Editor Resigns After Publicly Criticizing Coverage, Calls New CEO ‘Divisive’ (WSJ)

• The Real Story Behind NPR’s Current Problems (Slate)

• Hundreds of cargo ships lost propulsion in U.S. waters in recent years (WP)

• They Experimented on Themselves in Secret. What They Discovered Helped Win a War (Wired)

• How did life on Earth begin? Cracks may have been the key. (WP)

• Banks told to anticipate risks from using AI, machine learning (Reuters)

• AI and robotics demystify the workings of a fly's wing (Nature)

• Mother Still Searching For Preschool That Focuses Exclusively On Her Son (The Onion)