Tuesday August 21, 2001 |

You know, the world is feeling like a smaller place lately. It didn't take randomly running into a guy I know in a Prague train station late one June night for that to hit me. But it helped. After spending time outside the United States this summer, I realized how forces such as new technology and twisted politics seem to be shrinking the planet.

Just think about the University of Arizona for a second. By fate, luck, perseverance or parental pressure, we are all smashed together on the UA campus. All it took was "school" to bring 40,000-plus students from all over the world to a tiny block of city in the desert (6,300 of those are freshmen - dear God!) We don't need Led Zeppelin to tell us that the world is full of crossroads. I bet that if we agglomerated all the UA students, faculty and staff together, we could claim that we have come from all regions of the earth.

Maybe that isn't true. But it must be a darn good guess. When my friend and I left the States for six weeks this summer for Europe with nothing but a backpack, I had some na•ve notion that we would be departing from everything familiar.

But it was actually quite the contrary. Although we were on the opposite side of the globe, surprisingly, home didn't feel that far away.

While waiting in line at the Flying Pig Palace Hostel in Amsterdam at five in the afternoon, hoping - no, praying - to get a bed, I met a guy from the UA. Imagine that? Yet, it kept happening. In Florence, we crashed with two Wildcat guys because the only room at the hotel had four beds. In fact, I had my first real Italian pizza with them.

Not only did I continue to encounter UA-ers, but I couldn't escape from news about the U.S. I jumped for joy in London when I heard that Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords had renounced his affiliation with the Republican Party (I think most of Europe celebrated, too!). While President Bush was also on his first European tour, we got the news firsthand on how the world was responding to our new commander in chief - news that wouldn't make the evening news in our country.

Newspapers showed pictures of Dubya's daughters lying drunk on the floor. One paper had photos from protests in Madrid revealing angry Spaniards holding posters reading, "George W. Bush: Wanted for Climate Crimes." In Interlaken, Switzerland, we were sitting in a lobby with the radio on in the background. Every once in a while, we would hear "Bush" inserted into the German dialect, surrounded by laughter.

Our paths almost crossed with the president's when he attended the Great Eight Conference in Genoa, Italy. Days before the violent protest, we traveled through Italian towns where "No G8" was more than a common sight spray painted on walls. It doesn't take a genius to figure out the U.S. is creating and crossing paths in some political territories where we shouldn't be.

I need not also mention the negative impacts that backing out of the Kyoto Treaty, support for the Missile Defense System or our new administration's environmental ethics are having across the world.

I even read in a Canadian paper how India was pissed off at America because Bush owns a cat named India Ink. Protests paraded the streets of Bombay honoring a dog they named "George W" with a pathetic vengeance.

Is the world closely linked, or what?

I observed the most disturbing instance of our world shrinking under global pressures when we arrived in Barcelona, Spain. Nearly 10 years ago, when the city hosted the 1992 Olympics, it had been a place of peaceful celebration. But, on June 25, it housed a 20,000-person protest against the meeting of the World Bank. Held in a public square surrounded by national and international banks, activists demonstrated their disapproval of a dominating currency. Many European folks not only disliked the idea of the Euro - a single European monetary system - but also U.S. hegemony.

This rally didn't make U.S. news, either.

Out of everything we learned along the way, the one lesson that stuck out like a sore thumb is that technology intertwined with the actions of the top dogs of the world are causing this little blue planet to seem significantly smaller. The forces of globalization, overpopulation and excessive capitalization are turning this world into something along the lines of a clogged Los Angeles interchange.

Soon, if the United States is not careful, we just might watch our country crash hard in the intersection of one of those crossroads