Reflections

Vintage Auto at Eleventh Street Ride

Last week I joined thousands of other bloggers in writing about the power of “we”. This is the third year I have participated in this project, but this was the first year in which I sampled various blogs of my fellow participants. My only criteria was the language needed to be in English, although I did try a few in Spanish.

I read about a maritime preacher in Canada whose community work included renovation of a down-trodden, crime-infested area with no hope to one of bright new beginnings, a Hungarian who started a ‘fix my street’ website in Budapest, a New Zealander who bought a white chocalate-raspberry bar sold as a fund-raiser and turned it into a home-made ice-cream, a group of children in Thailand whose teacher thought it would be a good project for them to write a blog–amazing political commentary amongst some of them, the only clue to their age being their creative spelling (decent instead of descent), and a journalist in Lebanon who was near the recent car-bombing in central Beirut and answered the call for blood donation—the hospitals were packed full of potential donors, so many that they turned away hundreds.

Globalization is something that we might decry as taking away from our sense of home and things that are special to us, but in the end all of us are the same, with hopes and dreams and fears.