It's a Small World After All

I have arrived safely in England, and since the girls don't start coming back to school until Tuesday, we're working on getting the house ready. There was a rough map of the world on the wall in one of the common rooms that, instead of having the countries drawn out, had stickers of the country names written out in an approximation of the size and shape of each country. The problem was each sticker wasn't a country name, so literally every country name was spelled out with stickers of each individual letter in the name. So, over the hours I spent peeling probably thousands of letter stickers off the wall, I wasn't so much struck by how much I need a remedial 5th grade geography class, but of how small the world really is, yet how big it seems. My flight from Chicago to London took about 8 hours. According to Wikipedia, (I know it's Wikipedia, but bear with me here) in 1913, a London newspaper offered £10,000 to anyone who could fly an airplane from the U.S. or Canada to Great Britain or Ireland within 72 consecutive hours or less. Just a little over 100 years later, I made the journey in 1/9 of the time. In these days, the longest flight I know of is from the U.S. to Australia, which is somewhere around 24 hours. I could be in literally any country in the world in about a day or less, yet there are hundreds of countries I will never see. Back to peeling stickers, I thought about what a privilege it is that I'm able to travel to anywhere in the world. There are probably billions of people on this planet that will never have that opportunity. Our lives are polar opposites. And yet, we're all inextricably linked. I have a computer, phone, and an iPod which is ridiculous when you think about the fact that there are places in this world that struggle with access to clean water. Things that I consider common everyday items are robbing the resources of other countries, yet we depend on some of those countries to produce those very items I have. The problem is that when we watch the news and hear about epidemics, wars, and natural disasters, we often think of our world in terms of me vs. them. In reality, though, there is no me or them. There is only us. So despite the fact that I peeled stickers off the wall labeling countries as familiar as Canada, and as unfamiliar as Eritrea, we all share in the joys and tragedies of this world together.