it's a small world after all

The Guardian-UK ran an opinion piece titled, "We've hit peak injustice:  a world without borders, but only for the super-rich," by Hugh Muir.

...Something about wealthy people essentially "purchasing citizenships"....  ("Ah yes, sir, the rules apply to them, but not to you..." [ingratiating smile])


The article prompted 596 Reader Comments -- the one shown below helped me think about globalization (or, "globalisation," as the British people spell it...).

Tony Hill
--------------- Stop the first twenty people you meet in the street, in any country, and ask them where they, their parents or their grandparents were born.  Factor in the increase in global population, migration due to people escaping conflict or seeking a better life and multiply by the pace of technological advance and the world shrinks even more rapidly than some would like, or even like to acknowledge.


It has always been thus.  It is the human condition.  Mass migration, exploitation of the many by the few, inequality, "globalisation" and the desire for economic and territorial expansion are not modern phenomena.

What are new are the speed of technological advance and the rate of growth of the global population.  The latter has increased from around 3.6 billion in 1970 to 7.5 billion in 2017.


What has also increased is the ability for the gap between the rich and the poor to widen more quickly due to technological advances that enable the almost instantaneous exchange of commodities worldwide, including cash itself, coupled with a variety of nebulous financial instruments that the sometimes less than scrupulous members of our global society create.

As someone whose surname suggests my ancestors sharpened flint axes on a hillock somewhere in Salisbury Plain, I have never questioned or been troubled by the origin of any of my fellow Britons.  Whether or not I take into account the Celtic, Roman, Germanic, Nordic or Norman invasions of Britain in the distant past, or the relatively more recent influx of people due to our current post-colonial status and even more recently the loosening of borders not only here in the UK but also elsewhere.


We are inherently tribalistic and I fully understand why people feel threatened by all of this.  It is the speed of change rather than the change itself that engenders fear.

However, the challenges that we all face, i.e., inequality, competition for finite resources, global warming, pollution etc. cannot be overcome by isolationism and putting a little white picket fence around the nation.  What is more important is holding our governments 

and politicians 

to account to ensure that they act with integrity and ensure that the wealthy and those in positions of power also act with integrity and balance.


We must be more selective about what we believe, educating ourselves and striving always to get to the truth.  Ultimately, knowledge and truth are what empower the people -- and recently, neither have been in abundant supply.  What we are experiencing in the world is inevitable, the way in which we deal with it is not.

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Salisbury Plain

Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain
in England

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