(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
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A Manifesto for the Fast World [1]
['Thomas L. Friedman']
Date: 1999-03-28
And then there was the Liberian radio reporter who demanded to know why the Marines came to Liberia after the civil war broke out in 1989, evacuated only the United States citizens and then left. ''We all thought, 'The Marines are coming, we will be saved,''' he said. ''How could they leave?'' Poor guy, his country has no marines to rescue him. I'll bet he wouldn't mind paying some taxes for a few good men.
Employers don't have to fret about those pesky worker-safety rules in Angola, let alone services for the handicapped. The 70,000 Angolans who have had limbs blown off by land mines get by just fine on their own. You can see them limping around the streets of Luanda in Fellini-esque contortions, hustling for food and using tree limbs as a substitute for the human variety. And in Rwanda and Burundi, no one is asked to pay for Head Start, Medicaid, national service or student-loan programs. Instead they just have a Darwinian competition for scarce land, energy and water, with Tutsi and Hutu tribesmen taking turns downsizing one another to grab more resources for themselves.
Many in Congress are reluctant to go on trips abroad. They think it looks bad to their constituents. Too bad. They want all the respect and benefits that come with being an American in today's world, but without any of the sacrifices and obligations that go with it. They should come to war-torn Africa and get a real taste of what happens to countries where there is no sense of community, no sense that people owe their government anything, no sense that anyone is responsible for anyone else, and where the rich have to live behind high walls and tinted windows, while the poor are left to the tender mercies of the marketplace.
I don't want to live in such a country, or such a world. It is not only wrong, it will become increasingly dangerous. Designing ways to avoid that should be at the heart of American domestic and foreign policy. Unfortunately, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are thinking in those terms. They behave as if the world is now safe for us to be both insular and mindlessly partisan. To the extent that there is serious discussion about a shared national interest, it is about whether we can define a new common threat -- Iraq, China, Russia -- and not a new common mission. The ''big enemy'' is still the organizing principle of American internationalism, not the ''big opportunity'' -- let alone ''the big responsibility.''
America does have a bipartisan national interest to pursue, and it has an enormous role to play. But we won't begin to fully grasp that until we understand that we are in a new international system. For the last 10 years we've been talking about ''the post-cold-war world.'' We've described the world by what it isn't -- it's not the cold war -- because we don't know what it is. Well, what it is is a new international system called globalization. Globalization is not just a trend, not just a phenomenon, not just an economic fad. It is the international system that has replaced the cold-war system. And like the cold-war system, globalization has its own rules, logic, structures and characteristics.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/28/magazine/a-manifesto-for-the-fast-world.html
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