Global Village

Happy birthday America.

I've been on vacation for a little over 2 weeks and I'm exhausted. I'm starting to wonder when I can go back to school! I'm kidding of course. I'm back in the heartland, the crossroads of America, amongst the trains and the cornfields and the super friendly midwesterners who like to tell me their life stories and medical histories while I'm in line at the grocery store. (seriously)

I've had time to catch up on my reading (not the Economist as Dan would like me to read, but some good fiction and some trashy gossip rags). I've recently started a book by Bill Bryson about his travels in small town America, his search for the quintessential small town, one he would call "Amalgam." His story got me thinking...is there a perfect representation of America out there? While Dan and I were sunning ourselves on the beach at the Dunes National Lakeshore this past holiday weekend, I people watched. There we were, surrounded by languages foreign to our ears, and rarely did I hear English. It was Little Bangalore meets Little Mexico with a dash of Little Africa thrown in for good measure. Children all around me playing in the sand, peeing in the water, throwing bits of food at the sea gulls...a perfect representation of what America would become, or has become already. Are we pushing against a tide that has already swept in?

That night as Dan and I sat on the deck enjoying a wonderful South African red wine, eating American cashews, watching my brother light fireworks that were made in China, I pulled on my jacket that was made in Indonesia, kissed my boyfriend who works for a French company and listened to my father talk about the steel mill in which he has worked for over 30 years who was bought by an Indian company and just merged with a French company. We are no longer the America of post world war two, but the global village of the future.