On World Citizenship...

I was born an American, and despite the hard right turn into stupid that most of my country has taken in the last 30 years, I'm fairly proud to be one. I remember first learning about my country's beginnings when we were just a collection of backwater colonies in the burgeoning British Empire. I marveled at our capacity for self-determination and ingenuity, our taking of the best philosophies from the Age of Enlightenment and applying them to a government never before seen. The concepts of liberty and equality for the first time were written into the very fabric of a nation.

 But how did we go from THIS:

To THIS?!

I will be the first to admit that although I consider myself a patriotic American, I also rightfully acknowledge the fact that we slipped a little bit in our focus. Self-determination has been replaced by self gratification and is weirdly seen as one and the same by huge portion of the American population.

That said:

I remember when I was in my very young 20s, and Bob Marley was still just really good music to smoke herb to. Back then, when I heard his song "War" for the first time, I remember being transfixed by the honesty in his words. Even though this wasn't so much a song as it was a recitation of the speech made by Emperor Haile Selassie to the United Nations General Assembly in 1963, it brought up a concept that stayed with me ever since.

"World citizenship".

We humans have been squabbling over the lines on our maps for so long now, that the majority of us believe there simply is no other way to resolve conflicts between peoples other than blowing the shit out of each other with the biggest weapons we have. Yet person-to-person, I have never had a conflict with anybody outside of my culture that would make me want to hurt them. Governments, nations, and business interests always seem to be the ones telling us to stay in our safe little cocoons and take their word at face value that the rest of the world just isn't as nice as the place you are at right now.

But the Internet is changing that on an almost daily basis. We're seeing incredibly brave revolutions happening in places where freedom and liberty had no hope, but the people made it happen. There were even anonymous factions that consisted of people from almost every nation on the planet that were and still are assisting these revolutions through clever technological means. We have seen what happens when the regular people of the world, not the leaders or elite, band together to form an alliance that knows no other border above and beyond Internet bandwidth. This I believe is the world citizenship Haile Selassie spoke about in his speech and the concept that entranced Bob Marley enough to create one of the most beautiful and righteous rants for the Forces of Good ever to exist in music.

I would like to speak more on this subject, as I believe it's something that the human race will drift towards anyway. We will always have our regional culture, Texas will always be Texas, Stockholm will always be Stockholm. But maybe we can begin to appreciate each other's different cultures as being different notes in the same symphony, and marvel at how gorgeous that sonata is when we take a step back and really look. I know that a few weeks ago, I was the Egyptian. When Qaddafi savagely attacked his own people, I was a Libyan. When the earthquake hit New Zealand just recently, I was a Kiwi. Humanity has reached a point where our interconnectedness TO our diversity could be the one thing to finally solve this little blue dot's problems and launch us into the stars.

One can hope anyway....