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The Faces on the Horizon Look Familiar

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French priest and paleontologist.
Paleontologists are concerned about fossil plants and animals.
Maybe priests are, too.  Somewhere in my heap of books,
I have highlighted a sentence that said something like this:

We human beings, spread all over the earth,
looked up  and saw ourselves coming over the horizon.

That is where we are.

It is not just that we have walked everywhere:
even when we have spread out as far as we could,
we are almost instantly accessible to each other.
Mari and I flew to Atlanta over the weekend
to enjoy Marcia's fiftieth birthday celebration.
Other people came from other far places.

Communications technology is almost instantaneous.
Flowers at the florists come from South America.
A close look at the food on the grocer's shelves
will mirror a map of the world.
Cars, phones, tools, steel, oil, fish, and music
come to us from everywhere.
To watch the evening news is to watch the world
coming to us over the horizon.

It is absurd to think of ourselves as we once did:
a continent isolated by two oceans and a month's travel.

Is it any wonder that we cannot be who we are
without recognizing that everyone is our neighbor?
Not just the people across the street:  everyone.

For as long as most of us have been alive,
farmers in this country have known that they needed
laborers from Latin America to come here
and help bring the crops in.  In turn, we import
some of their crops because we like their food.

But we have trouble admitting what is plainly true.
It is a global economy.  Trade is global, and local.
Some of the jobs have moved far off,
and some of the things we do affect people
who live in Zimbabwe and Bhutan.

It is not all roses and riesling.
The scale of commerce and trade
hurt some people and benefit others
unequally.  And when we ignore that,
as we very often do, people get angry.

That is where we live now:
some people are very angry,
and because they are hurting,
they lash out, very often
at the wrong places and people.

Going back to something we remember
is rarely an adequate response to something new.
Lashing out at . . . what?  Trade?  Mexican workers?
Immigrants?  Government itself?  New ideas?
Jet planes?  Science?  Plain facts about things?
is a mindless and self-destructive reaction.

Some of our trade agreements surely do
work to the disadvantage of some of us,
just as they do to our trading partners,
and some of that is inevitable because
none of us is smart enough to know everything.

Not even in hindsight.

But we live in a global economy, not distant villages.
We cannot, ought not, and will not go back
to the Thirteen Colonies, or the Confederacy.
We will bring spices from Indonesia,
and send corn and beans and computers to others.

To rail against trade is absurd.
To hone better trade agreements is desirable,
for everyone.  What happen in Syria
is important, not only to us, but to almost everyone.
When religious zealots in Saudi Arabia and Iran
vow to eliminate each other, it affects everyone.
When religious zealots in Europe tried to kill each other,
that affected everyone, too, and the reverberations
can still be measured, however dampened.

Maybe because I remember having been there,
I do not want to go back to the 1950s,
or to America First, or No Jews, or Italians, or Irish Allowed.
There will be no more Men, Women, and Colored signs.
The place where women are supposed to be is gone.
We really do have a Black man in the White House,
and he has been a good President and a wonderfully decent man.

There is no place to go back to.

There is a crying need to seize this moment
and move forward together, to something better.

No one else is going to do it for us.




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