How do we widen the scope of our awareness beyond the borders of a West-centered world, especially in this era of high-tech transformations that impacts our notions of identity and destiny? This website called Worlds of Difference may provide us with a clue as it "presents stories of people facing critical decisions about who they are and who they want to be."
There's more than meets our myopic perception, indeed. Here are three voices worth mulling over to make us more sensitive and sensible as mediators/communicators in a planet where progress as an idea often cramps our capacity for enlightenment:
"I am caught within a circle from which there is no escape: the less human societies were able to communicate with each other and therefore to corrupt each other through contact, the less their respective emissaries were able to perceive the wealth and significance of their diversity."
—Claude Levi-Strauss, from Tristes Tropiques
"The ideal of a single civilization for everyone implicit in the cult of progress and technique impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life."
—Octavio Paz, Mexican poet
"It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences."
—Audre Lorde, American poet
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