This is where I start to question whether this whole concept of the "social bubble" -- which I admittedly just referenced as real in the first paragraph -- is even a valid one at all. One of the first attempts at honest analysis after the Democratic loss in November was typically-liberal self-reflection... Are we only talking to other like-minded individuals, and not even noticing what's going on in the world around us? I've taken time to think about this thoroughly, and my answer is simple... only sort of. It's actually dumbass comments like the one above that helped me come to that conclusion. Have I only been talking to people who support across-the-board sexual, racial, and religious equality, environmentally conscious politics and industry, and the forward progress of the entire human race? Well, if you can manage to fit all that into a bubble, then yes. The other side, the one where that sort of stuff isn't quite as important as racial/national/religious identity and regression into a xenophobic, paranoid, nostalgic, never-was past, is even more of a bubble, and one that is doomed to destroy itself to boot. By this token, "globalism" isn't a concept that we have the luxury of either supporting or not.
Let me illustrate my point with extremes: Let's say that you're about as right-leaning as a person can get. Let's say that you're way past leaning -- you've entirely fallen over and gotten red state all over yourself, and maybe even rolled around in it some. All you care about is forcibly combatting the dissolution of your concept of an idealized "America" tailored to fit you, in the face of all the immigrants and foreign terrorists that have come to take over everything "real" Americans have built, and to slake their thirst with the blood of infidels. Your focus, then, necessarily, has to be global. You can't build an impermeable dome over America (as much as you may want to) so you have to deal with your opponents on the world stage. This, by definition, is globalism.
Now, conversely, let's say that you're the opposite of the right-winger you just were, and have gone all the way over to the left. You're so busy appreciating the unique snowflake that is each and every human being and growing your own self-sustaining solar-powered whale farm that you barely have any time to stand in front of pipeline construction crews. All that matters to you is the benefit, equality, and well-being of everyone. Well, then congratulations to you too, because you have to deal with the world outside the borders of America.
There's literally nowhere on the spectrum between these endpoints where a person can afford to be -- or even truthfully say that they are -- "anti-globalism". It's the difference between being an active participant in the world as a whole, or pretending that you don't have to be. You might have been able to pull off that illusion before the Industrial Revolution, but I'm pretty sure that we neither can nor want to go back to the way things were then.
I've adopted a new personal motto lately, but I've been having trouble putting it into a form where it can be bumper-sticker ready. It goes something like "We can raise all the boats". The wording is kind of obscure, but my point is this: there is a way to run a country -- and a world -- so that everyone prospers. When you do this, it creates a positive feedback loop. There's nothing being given away when you eradicate inequality. The only reason to not want to divest yourself of unfair privilege is if you're sure that's the only reason you've gotten to where you are.
We've been conditioned to believe, through various forms of mass media, that situations are always us vs. them, and the "them" are usually motivated by nothing other than sheer stupidity or malice, evil for the sake of being evil. There's probably another essay waiting to dissect that particular idea, but for now let me stay on track...
Improving the lives of those around you isn't just beneficial for you, it's essential to your survival. This is true not just in your house, or in your community, but the world in general. We can't pretend that our country is a closed system anymore. It never was, in fact. The reason we've become one of the world's biggest powers is that we attract the best and brightest from around the world. I think one of the missteps in logic people sometimes fall into here is the belief that we assimilate newcomers and make them American; in truth, America alters itself to accommodate its ever-shifting influx of people and their particular influences. Resistance against this is self-defeating.
No one person's America is the *definitive* America. Make whatever outrageous claims you want to about the Founding Fathers and their motives, but the one thing that's fundamentally clear is that they didn't want too much power in the hands of the few. By cracky, that's how things have run so far, and it's worked well enough that both our general population and those they elect have had the luxury of temporarily forgetting it.
Well, here's our wake-up call. America isn't some kind of entity that exists outside the rest of the world. It's an integral part of it. So let's govern with logic and reason, and raise *all* the boats. Putting some people first, before others, is how we've gotten to this horrific tipping point. Globalism is the only way to survive, not to mention achieve the meritocracy that both sides of the political fence agree we should strive for.
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