The View

FROM HEMINGWAYS ATTIC

 

We see daily the carnage of the middle east while we contemplate what is to come in a post 9/11 world. We wonder seriously if the world has gone slightly mad and maybe Armageddon is just around the corner. But I would say we are watching the death throes of an old world dying and there is something entirely different around the corner.

You see we are of the old world. We are of a world formed in the last century. We are of a world of nationalistic pride and racial prejudice. We are of a world of lines and boundaries and old traditions dying hard ugly deaths. But we are not of the new world. I saw the new world just the other day. I was watching my son's kindergarten spring choral concert. His school is very diverse. I was a parent among other parents there to get a glimmer of their child. I like all the other parents was tired and stressed from the workaday world and I was trying to focus into that little world for a while. There was the usual cute songs that some of the students sang and some didn't. They were kindergartners after all. But then there was a final song. I don't even really remember what it was. But all the kids knew the song and they had banners they waved around in the air. Then suddenly it hit me.

There they were. All of them not more than five or six. They were black and white and Japanese and Mexican and Puerto Rican and mulatto and Chinese. They were all these children singing together and I realized then what their world would be like. You see this technological revolution is not technological at all. This is not a cyber revolution. This is a world revolution. As the world gets more wired and boundaries fall then we will be a people of the world. This will not be out of nobility, this will simply be evolution. And so I knew then that those children would be better than we are now. As we are better than our parents.

Their world will know less differences, less prejudices. Their world will be more savvy more clean more efficient and more harmonious. They will use technology as a tool not as a gimmick and it will simply be a component of their world. The old world is one of suspicions and age old feuds and petty nationalism. Nationalism will be in the dust bin of history in a hundred years. There will simply be no place for it a world that is integrated. And the world will be integrated.

They will view this world as we now view the Southern Confederacy. Yes, even the next generations of the middle east will eventually throw off those old rivalries and see that Jew or gentile or Arab or Muslim there is little difference. Again, this is not my desire, it is simply the way the world is evolving. No one can afford to be isolated any more and we are seeing the last vestiges of the old world dying before our eyes. Be it however painful, there will be a flower growing from the carnage of our bleeding age. I know, I saw it for a moment, and it was a beautiful thing.