Globalization Ignorantia

Globalization...oy...it makes my brain hurt...
With the world-wide-webs and communication systems, we are extraordinarily connected to humans any where on the planet in some way, shape or form. It is only right...nay...vital...to recognize that globalization is happening and that we are all part of a global community.  We must not leave our familial, cultural, religious, or nationality, behind, but we must build a greater capacity to understand that we are all connected, regardless of family, culture, religion, or nationality...we are all humans.  The ability to learn and to motivate in building a world that has put equality above independence, equality above profits and equality above hate is a global community that I would like to grow old in.
I digress.

I bring this up because of my ignorance...yes...I have faults...ignorance can at one time instill stupidity  and within seconds...embarrassment.  In Social Epidemiology class the other month we were talking about human rights, social behaviour, etc...and the subject of de facto segregation came up.   Americans can talk for days about the injustices faced by minorities and the road that was taken from slavery to Brown v. Board of Education to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s non-violent protests to affirmative action.  But very few Americans could give a comparative analysis of the American struggle of human injustices with those faced by the South African population well into the 1990s, and that includes myself.  I never really thought about the fact that we knew the American de facto segregation and its effects well before the de jure segregation ended in South Africa, and with more knowledge and advocacy, could have changed the injustices and inequalities faced by the South African populations.


I have much to learn, but I think that it would have helped if it was presented during my early childhood, because now I am going to read about 50 books and become obsessed with this...mainly out of the fact that my education was a product of the 1980s and 1990s, when the apartheid was still happening and there was not enough emphasis placed on how other countries experienced or were experiencing the same injustices and the fact that I am a bit of a dork. I can admit, a little part of me wants to blame the American education system, I have done it in the past, but the reality is that I would not be writing this right now if I didn't have some kind of education, an education that is hardly offered to enough people on this planet of ours.  So I am either ignorant or ungrateful...or (greatest possibility) both.
I digress yet again.

People should start thinking, including myself, about globalization and this whole 'we are all connected' because we are, it's a bit freaky and it's more complex than ever...but oh how it is fascinating. And keep in mind that mentoring the youth regarding these issues is the most effective path, they hold the most power/the most energy to learn from history and go forward to live with love for human beings and know that on earth we must be the guide to equality.

I leave you with a significantly large passage from Robert Kennedy's 1966 speech to South African citizens:

For two centuries, my own country has struggled to overcome the self-imposed handicap of prejudice and discrimination based on nationality, on social class or race — discrimination profoundly repugnant to the theory and to the command of our Constitution. Even as my father grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, signs told him: "No Irish Need Apply." Two generations later President Kennedy became the first Irish Catholic, and the first Catholic, to head the nation; but how many men of ability had, before 1961, been denied the opportunity to contribute to the nation’s progress because they were Catholic or because they were of Irish extraction? How many sons of Italian or Jewish or Polish parents slumbered in the slums — untaught, unlearned, their potential lost forever to our nation and to the human race? Even today, what price will we pay before we have assured full opportunity to millions of Negro Americans?

In the last five years we have done more to assure equality to our Negro citizens, and to help the deprived both white and black, than in the hundred years before that time. But much, much more remains to be done. For there are millions of Negroes untrained for the simplest of jobs, and thousands every day denied their full and equal rights under the law; and the violence of the disinherited, the insulted, the injured, looms over the streets of Harlem and of Watts and of the South Side Chicago.

But a Negro American trains now as an astronaut, one of mankind’s first explorers into outer space; another is the chief barrister of the United States government, and dozens sit on the benches of our court; and another, Dr. Martin Luther King, is the second man of African descent to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent efforts for social justice between all of the races.

We have passed laws prohibiting — We have passed laws prohibiting discrimination in education, in employment, in housing, but these laws alone cannot overcome the heritage of centuries — of broken families and stunted children, and poverty and degradation and pain.

So the road toward equality of freedom is not easy, and great cost and danger march alongside all of us. We are committed to peaceful and nonviolent change, and that is important to all to understand — though change is unsettling. Still, even in the turbulence of protest and struggle is greater hope for the future, as men learn to claim and achieve for themselves the rights formerly petitioned from others.

And most important of all, all of the panoply of government power has been committed to the goal of equality before the law, as we are now committing ourselves to the achievement of equal opportunity in fact. We must recognize the full human equality of all of our people before God, before the law, and in the councils of government. We must do this, not because it is economically advantageous, although it is; not because the laws of God command it, although they do; not because people in other lands wish it so. We must do it for the single and fundamental reason that it is the right thing to do.

We recognize that there are problems and obstacles before the fulfillment of these ideals in the United States, as we recognize that other nations, in Latin America and in Asia and in Africa, have their own political, economic, and social problems, their unique barriers to the elimination of injustices.

In some, there is concern that change will submerge the rights of a minority, particularly where that minority is of a different race than that of the majority. We in the United States believe in the protection of minorities; we recognize the contributions that they can make and the leadership that they can provide; and we do not believe that any people — whether majority or minority, or individual human beings — are "expendable" in the cause of theory or of policy. We recognize also that justice between men and nations is imperfect, and the humanity sometimes progresses very slowly indeed.

I cried a little.
Source:
http://www.southafrica.to/history/Apartheid/Robert_Kennedy/Kennedy_Cape_Town.htm