Someone said that, though I will admit that I do not know who. You can look it up. Although her political future may be unclear right now, Governor Sarah Palin proved several things. She appealed to many people because she seemed to be like ‘average’ Americans. If some reports and plenty of anecdotal evidence is to be believed, her knowledge of geography may be one area where she and the many of us are in sync. While her ignorance of facts like that Africa is a continent and not a country and what countries are in North America is particularly scary because she could very well have become the president, that we care so little about the world outside our borders, state or national, is depressing. (http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/05/02/geog.test/index.html)
Much of the world celebrated Barack Obama’s win along with us and that is a good thing. We may not know who they are but they know us. What’s more disturbing about the report above is this:
Fewer than three in 10 think it important to know the locations of countries in the news and just 14 percent believe speaking another language is a necessary skill.
When I sat down to write something about this topic I wanted to write about the current crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I was going to start by talking referencing the situation there with my experience as a UN employee and mention that while the US become more and more focused on Iraq and the atrocities Saddam Hussein had committed I was focused on a more dire situation, that of the DRC. Then, like now, rebels were killing innocent civilians and the reports I saw were too horrible to repeat here. At the time I did what I could to get the US press to care but in the year I worked on this, only one paper wrote an article (the Denver Post) and I think that was just to shut me up. Maybe we can only focus on one international issue at a time. Maybe it is because few people could find it on a map, though few can find Iraq on a map, too. I think it is because we have this idea that Africa is a dark and dangerous place. We expect them to kill each other so we are not surprised when they do.
As with the Rwandan crisis in the 1990s, a lot of coverage of recent events has focused on the ethnic aspect and once again we hear it repeated that these people have been fighting since the beginning of time. As I have said before, this is not true but we all know that doesn’t matter. We look for reasons not to intervene and cling to them. Granted we have a lot on our plate right now, with the economic crisis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even the Middle East peace process is taking a back seat to more pressing issues. I do not want to see American troops deployed all over the world but I would like to see people take a greater interest in the planet we all inhabit. Not only would greater understanding help in times of crisis but in better times. It should go without saying that we have a vested interest in learning more about the world but I guess not.
AlysonChadwick.com 