I still don't understand Americans' (and the current administration's) tendency to write off entire areas of the world as irrelevant and/or ignorable. This was never true, but I would have thought that 9/11 would have made at least a few people take stock. Still, just about every media outlet (not necessarily only American) carry banner stories (and some buried on page A56) screaming variations on the theme of "There are bad things out there!!" Or, in the case of Fox News: “What you don’t know will kill you!” As if these things magically appeared out of nowhere-- metaphorically and literally. Wake up, people!

Perhaps it's racism, cynicism, or good old apathy, but the one thing the world needs to wake up to is that it can't just say "Oh, the Rabbani regime is about to topple to a bunch of students (Talibs), but that doesn't matter to me here in the West." We did that when the French were fighting (and losing) in Indochina, when a certain Serb politician made a speech in Pristina, when the value of the Bhat took a nose-dive, and countless other instances.

It’s also important that people realize there are more crises going on in the world than Iraq and (if you’re really a policy wonk) North Korea. Check out what’s going on in Sierra Leone, the Ukraine, Sudan, Belarus, Indonesia, Argentina, Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Georgia (links to come)-- each of these are potentially explosive and have the potential to severely impact American, indeed global, interests. And there are countless trans- supra- and sub-national issues I haven't even touched on.

I'm not saying we need to rush in and get involved in each of them like we did to Iraq and Afghanistan or even provide material support-- some of them might require only the world's interest or diplomacy to make a significant difference. The international outcry and subsequent (relative) restraint shown by the PRC during and after the Tian’anmin Square demonstrations was closely watched by anti-communist groups in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

What we really need is awareness—I know it’s wishy-washy to declare that apathy is bad and not come out with a definitive solution (though I will be posting some of my ideas later), but it seems the American public has moved even closer to that pole. With questions like “Why do they hate us?” and “Isn’t it terrible that their ideas of the world are shaped by all that propaganda and anti-Americanism?” In my experience, very few of the people who ask that question have even sought out international news sources (like The World Radio Network and “The Ultimate Collection of News Links”) and seriously questioned their assumption that what they saw on prime-time American news is the “truth.” And what about talking to people from different countries (and I don’t mean trying to talk to the next non-white person that passes you on the street). The Internet has made this even easier, but for whatever reason, many don’t take advantage of it.

There’s so much to this, but I’ve got to get back to work—I’d be interested to hear people’s thoughts on this topic in general as well as my posting. I guess that’s what the comment option is for….