Global Village?

Had a weird few days of syncronicity occurring, and it all seems to be about depressing me. Yesterday I was listening to Air America Radio on the way to work, and they had an interview with the daughter of Marshall McLuhan. Now if you've never heard of Mr. McLuhan, go out immediately and get his Understanding Media; Marshall McLuhan has proven to be one of the most interesting and prophetic media critics of the twentieth century (in my humble opinion). Not only did he invent many of the phrases we now use (such as "The Global Village" and "The Medium is the Message"), but he also constructed conceptual frameworks from which to examine new communicative technologies. Now while I can't endorse everything he said (he had a tendency toward hyperbole), I am constantly amazed at how much of our current age he foresaw.

Now one of his more accepted notions is that modern media would turn the Earth into a "Global Village," an interconnected web where the farthest corners of the world are united by television, phone, Internet, etc. Certainly, it's hard to deny the truth of this; the recent coverage of and support toward the victims of the Boxing Day Tsunami must have touched every rural farmer in Iowa or Scottish sheep herder by now. 24-Hour news, Internet web sites, satellite phones, and the like keep us (or at least the Western World "us") as connected to the farthest reaches of the world as we chose to be. Many have taken hope from this phenomenon, believing that the common human conditions of racism, hatred, and intolerance will be abated once we see the human faces of our farthest neighbors.

But other events have caused me to worry that this may not be the case. I was lunching with several co-workers the other day, and the issue of aid to the Tsunami victims came up. To my shock, there was very little sympathy for the plight of the disaster's victims. The arguments against aid went like this:

1. The victims are ungrateful; they have stated that the U.S. donation of 350 million dollars is insufficient, and if that's their attitude then they don't deserve the help
2. The victims are hypocritical; where were these people when we were fighting the war on terror in Iraq? Did they donate to the victims of 9/11? What are they doing to help the poor children in this country?
3. The victims are victims because of their own bad choices; I mean, they built everything on islands near the coast, what do they expect? And why should we (America) help them rebuild everything on the same beaches, only to be destroyed by the next Tsunami?

Hopefully, you don't need to be told that I was shocked by these responses. And it is relatively easy to debunk the logic of their reasons. But what depressed me more than the lack of compassion or the faulty logic is the sheer isolationist theme that ran through the reasons. I mean, here we are (America, that is) fighting a "global war on terror" as the only remaining superpower, yet it's typical citizens seem to only want to concentrate on their own problems, if even that (I didn't see people actually doing anything to help feed needy children in this country, but instead only complain that something wasn't being done). It was as if they were saying, "The world seems to hate us, so screw them." This doesn't strike me as the compassionate Global Village foreseen by McLuhan; rather, it seems like the petty and myopic backbiting typically visible in political in-fighting and playground scuffles. Could it be that this isolationism is a reaction to the events of 9/11? Or even worse, could it be the first symptoms of the decline of the "America Empire?" I mean, it seems to me that the moment a world power stops looking beyond it's borders, it stops being relevant. So will history see the beginning of this new century as the moment when the experiment known as the U.S. of A. began to fall in on itself by abandoning it's role in the world?

Now, some might say that this is a good thing; America has never done will with being an Empire. But can the U.S. survive the loss of prestige, both political and economic? And what will happen when we're no longer able to keep our mistakes from coming home to roost?

It's times like this that I remember a story from the Kennedy White House. Apocryphally, when one of JFK's aides asked him why he was a strident supporter of aid to Africa and other countries, his answer was, "Because we are the minority on this planet." Good fact to remember, even for the most pragmatic and least compassionate.