Coming Together

When I was in grade school back in the 1950s and early 1960s, my family liked to travel by automobile a good deal in the summers. On our travels, which took us as far as to the east as New York City and  Washington, D.C. and as far to the west as  Arizona, California,  Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and Utah, I noticed that in the small towns, people dressed differently than they did in the cities. So, it was pretty easy to tell who was an urban “sophisticate” and who was not just by looking at them. There were definite, observable differences.

We stopped out travels in 1963, the year that I started high school. The next time that I left urbanity was to visit my grandmother in the hospital in a small town in Wisconsin over the Christmas vacation in the 1970-1 school year.

 On that trip, I noticed that the world had changed. People my age wore the same hair styles, the same trendy eye glasses and the same fashions in the small towns as they did in urbanity. I ascribed this change to modern mass communications and a breaking down of rural isolation.  Subsequent travels over the years have confirmed this observation. In America nowadays, we all dress pretty much alike, allowing for the weather.

Back when the Olympics started last week, I noticed Chinese athletes “high fiving” each other after the competition was over and the scores were announced. Can you imagine that happening a generation or two ago? I cannot. That was another indication to me that the world had come together a good deal. That certainly would not have happened under Chairman Mao!

Today a friend sent me a link to a web site maintained to help combat veterans get over the trauma of war. The linked pages contain photographs taken by Russian journalists in the invasion of Georgia. Before you click on the link, I need to warn you that some of the photographs are quite bloody, showing charred, dead bodies and seriously wounded soldiers. http://www.navoine.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?t=112&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

The reason that I have mentioned that this link is not because I am in to photographs of carnage. Rather, what struck me as interesting and relevant to our discussion  were the photographs that did not show  dead bodies or blood. Rather the photographs of the places and the motor vehicles made me realize that except for the use of Cyrillic alphabet on the Russian vehicles and signs, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabet the places and things shown look remarkably similar to place and things that I have seen myself in the U.S.

Can you imagine that fifty years ago–if the Internet had  existed–that someone from America viewing that part of the world would have had that reaction? I doubt it.

Like it or not, the world is become more similar and less exotic. Granted, the Russians still beat up on their smaller neighbors. But, maybe Western ideas are filtering in along with the hairstyles and the similarity of vehicles.  I hope so!