Globalization blues

Unity ought to be a foregone conclusion in light of the universality of the human condition and the common fate of peoples regardless of diversity. Especially with the innovative and transcendent capacity of digital technology, cutting-edge communication should have rendered it convenient for nations and races to understand, to empathize with each other, and to forge a fellowship that breaches the borders/walls of stratification along sociocultural and economic fault lines. The dark ages of intolerance should have been passé, and the tragedies of the past should no longer cast a long shadow of ideological disquiet.

Then again, though science has cracked the codes of the human genome and has propelled a conquest of outer space, the earthlings remain shrouded in the smoke of prejudice. It’s a no-brainer how the news continues to broadcast the pall of ethnocentric ignorance and arrogance. Even the blind can see how ideological divisiveness persists in driving a wedge across the world.

To the extent that ideology influences both the shifting tide of geopolitics and the crosscurrents of market forces, the reports have rendered it obvious ad nauseam how power packs a tidal wave of repercussions. Consider how the beliefs of Wall Street executives—steeped in selfish materialism and the culture of consumption that could hold water to sharks’ cold-blooded appetite—continue to have far-reaching effects beyond the shores of a recession-riddled America. Consider, too, how the economic values of the US-controlled International Monetary Fund (IMF) have long been imposed on exotic-sounding countries at the expense of their own ingeniously indigenous agenda for development.

Consequently, this ideology of greed has spawned problems in the local setting where disastrous levels of inequity have risen on a global scale. Think of the effect of ecological exploitation in the Amazon forest or the ocean around Japan, for instance. Truly, it’s staggering to contemplate the fallout from a depleted ozone layer—not to mention the unquantifiable loss of pharmacological possibilities—due to trees and shrubs reduced to ashes. The scarcity of marine resources has become a headache not only for hungry local fishermen but also for the rest of us dying to have a healthy diet of seafood.

Where discontent arises, so does violence. Similar to environmental horror, the heartbreak caused by terrorism definitely demands international cooperation. More than a sleepless issue of homeland security for Americans, it is also a nightmare for people elsewhere. Who’s to say, for instance, that an air raid that bombs a whole generation of Afghan villagers to extinction is less harrowing than planes slamming against buildings?

No man is an island, one poet stated while another echoed an unsettling conclusion why we’re all in this plagued planet together: “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”