Earl's World

EARL’S WORLD----26
IN SUMMARY

This has been a rare experience, a real odyssey for me, traveling around the world with this shipboard student body for 110 days. It is hard to end it all, close the journal without some reflection on the meaning and worth of it all.

I ask myself just what many of my friends will ask me “what was the highlight of your trip”?. When so much of it was new, exciting, at times, riveting, dramatic, and beautiful one contemplates it all, I think what was so special, so rare an experience was being in the company of many bright, attractive, and energetic young college students. I shared their classroom lectures, visited at the dining table and traveled to unique destinations with them. My days were mostly apart from them but crossing paths with these dynamic young people was my supreme experience.

They were challenged at the beginning of the voyage to open their minds, peer deeply, engage themselves in all they would see and do. They would travel through the peaks and valleys of their worlds, take notes, celebrate, ponder and many may weep at what they see because it would redefine their values, would shift their priorities, change their lives into a better person.

Before their eyes they would see the dregs of poverty, the poorest of the poor, the shinning city on a hill and happy faces on children from West Africa to Japan. They would rethink war, the cruelty of oppression, the misdistribution of wealth, and they would dwell on, and study, globalization as it impacts our world and puts us at eye level with dominating forces that affects us all. They saw the economic revolution going on in Asia, the shift of America from number one in areas of growth and production. They tried to put meaning in those statistics matched with the personal and social values they have acquired as Americans such as happiness and joy and charity that registers high on the scale of life’s values.

I heard them speak with deep emotions on the subject of wealth, in too few hand, the Conflict Diamond Industry in darkest Africa, the Plastic Waste Conundrum, Public School Uniforms, Fair Trade, Taser Guns and Community Service.

I asked, as many of my young friends do,“what is the value of being number one in the world”? So China is growing at 15% a year in GNP, Japan has the highest per capita income. What have we lost? The business model which the students have heard much about in the courses on globalization, proclaims that production drives the world, loyalty is for profit, corporative objective is the client, the bottom line is the shareholder.
With that in mind America exports McDonalds, and coca cola and thus American obesity, and reaps a good profit. These two companies are the model for being socially
conscience and pro-active in their world wide markets.

This may be the Asian Century but this mean we turn away or loose our American values. The political model includes public voices which this new generation can speak with great alacrity. As Thomas Friedman noted recently in an article, America is still the number one in imagination and innovation. And for me, maybe happiness.