This is long and difficult and I’m likely missing something, but I don’t fully get the reaction of some of my fellow-citizens of the United States of America when tragic international events make their way onto our soil. Whether 9-11 or Ebola, “How could it happen here?” they demand with offended tones. Let me say first off, I recognize that death is always a blow to someone, bringing hurt. I also believe that the U.S.A. is the best place to live that I know of. I am an immigrant, in fact, a double-immigrant. Born in Jamaica, raised in Canada, I’m here by choice. I fly my 6’ by 10’ Old Glory every day. I thank God for the opportunities this country has given to my family and me. But as an American, I don’t imagine myself as part of an anointed species, detached from my global neighbors, or from my own relatives and ancestors in other countries. Part of our problem is a tendency to buy into delusionary thinking that we are self-made as isolated individuals, achieving our success solitarily, by our own ingenuity. Life is interdependent. Our various ecologies are more contingent than we might believe, our destinies more connected than we can see. It’s like second-hand smoke. We all breathe the same air. A U.S. passport does not ensure immunity from planetary problems, like an invisible and invincible force field protecting us from them; nor, frankly, protecting them from us, because we all inhabit the same tiny room in this vast universe. (While it’s a slightly different topic, the same goes for the chronic tragedy of violent crime in U.S. inner cities—it is not just “their” issue, it is all of ours. What we together don’t deal with “there” will eventually come home to roost elsewhere, and then you’ll get the corollary comment: “These sorts of things just don’t happen in our kind of neighborhood!”) So, while we must make every reasonable effort to protect our national borders, the viruses of terrorism or hemorrhagic fever are not big respecters of the lines we draw. Neither are the many benefits of internationalization which we enjoy reaping—economically, technologically, intellectually and culturally. Why, then, should we be so devastatingly shocked by the negative consequences we occasionally reap, some of which are made worse because we haven’t borne more global responsibility. The more we re-imagine ourselves as part of the whole world, and act that way, the healthier and safer we all will be.
Posted on: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 16:57:11 +0000
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