A Small World—for a Few

Remember, though, that the world is small for only a few of us; from the rest, we are very distant. For every Chinese engineer whose visa is arranged by the Microsoft monarchy, there are 1,000,000 Chinese living in poverty and to whom most opportunities are closed. Here's the dark side of the Chinese miracle: the goods made in China, so inexpensive to us, are unaffordable to the people who make them.

In a few days, our team will be visiting HIV/AIDS patients in South Africa, where, in some countries, a fourth of the population is infected. When I first was a pastor in the San Francisco bay area about 20 years ago, I met several Seventh-day Adventist gay men who died soon after I met them. It has been years since we’ve seen that in the United States, thanks to effective drug therapy. But the world is not small enough to get those drugs for millions of Africans, apparently.

So to the argument that this is a small world—a flat, globalized world—indeed it is in many things of little importance: pop music, movies, fashions, sports. In those things that really matter (health, money, leisure time, education), a fraction of us are on one side of this flattened world, and the rest on the other.