The World is Getting Smaller

In seventh grade, I had 7th period geography with Mr. McCammon.  On the second day of class, I remember him giving us a lesson on how "the world is getting smaller".  Being a naive seventh-grader, the first thing I thought he meant was that the physical size of planet Earth was shrinking.  Of course, Mr. McCammon meant the size we felt the world was, not its actual size.


500 years ago, the world was getting bigger.  Europeans had discovered a whole other side of the world.  Ever since that doubling of the world, we've worked to make this planet smaller using new technologies from faster ships to telegraphs to planes to the internet.


I'm not sure that I had a truly great understanding of how small our world has become before going on this semester abroad.  Despite being physically over 4000 miles away from home, I wasn't ever more than a computer away from being face-to-face with my mother over Skype.  People used to go years between conversations with their parents.  I rarely went over a week.


Being an American in this small world has its advantages.  While abroad various "comfort" foods were always near-by.  Sure, one has to jump through a few hoops and fight a few dragons in order to find a jar of peanut butter or a bottle of Mountain Dew in southern Germany, but I really could have eaten an "American" meal every single meal abroad.  I didn't, however.


This brings up the disadvantage of being an American in this small world.  With English being a world language and American culture spread over the West and then some, there is the tendency to not fully immerse oneself in other cultures.  I'm guilty of this.  My lack of German knowledge really held me back from wanting to fully jump into German culture.  If I could do this over again, I really would have made more of an effort to learn German.  I fell victim to the often repeated phrase "everyone speaks English over there".  While that is fairly true, that fact shouldn't have been an excuse for me to not learn more of another language.


I think the best example of how small our world is occurred on my flight back to the States.  While waiting for my Air India flight from Frankfurt to Chicago, a man commented on my Purdue shirt.  He asked if I was a student there and various things like that.  When he asked where I was from, I replied "southern Indiana".  Seeming familiar with that area of the Midwest, he asked where in southern Indiana.  When I asked if he knew where Terre Haute was, he replied, "Yea, my father was from Sullivan..."


I'm 4000 miles away, and I find someone whose family is from my town of 4000 people.


"The world is getting smaller."