I was watching CNN and caught the news conference that ended President Bush's first official trip out of the country. As the cameras rolled he turned to President Fox of Mexico, and spoke to him in Spanish.
In Spanish!! Whatever else was going on there, President Bush was showing that, in language at least, he's far better qualified than most of his predecessors. There's been no president in my lifetime who spoke a language other than English with anything resembling fluency. Most of them could deliver a well-coached phrase or two, but that's about it.
The most famous example of that was what President Kennedy's did on his trip to Berlin in 1963. He wanted to show the Berliners that the US was with them. So, Kennedy added some German to his speech. "I am a Berliner" is what he said. Or, actually, what he thought he said.
What he actually said, despite writing the phrase out phonetically, was closer to "I am a jelly doughnut." The effort and intent got cheers anyway. It was the thought that counted.
Internationalization has always been a part of life for some people. Europeans are within easy distance of other countries. They grow up speaking a language beside their own. That's not true for Americans. Very few of us can get by in a language other than English.
Folks who live in port cities have always been citizens of the world to some extent, because the ships that brought goods also brought people from different places.
Take a walk from the river inland along Market Street in Wilmington, North Carolina, where I live. You'll see a variety of "first" churches. The first Lutheran church in North Carolina is there. There's also a first Episcopal church and a first Presbyterian church and a synagogue.
Those houses of worship are evidence of the thriving port that was once Wilmington. People came here from all over, speaking multiple languages. That created problems and opportunities. The Swift meat packing company had a plant here in the early twentieth century.
Their ships would come in and the crews would do what crews have done since the Phoenicians pulled into Carthage and gave the crew liberty. They got drunk and they got in fights and they got thrown in jail. The company would send some of their employees who spoke different languages down to the jail to interpret for the crew and to represent them in court. It was a regular thing.
An increasingly regular thing in the US right now, is the presence of people who speak Spanish as their primary language. George W. Bush was governor of Texas, where there's a large Mexican population.
The Spanish he speaks isn't the elevated Castilian that was the Spanish taught in high school when I was a boy. Instead, it's more like the gritty Tex-Mex that you hear in the streets, especially along the border.
In many ways large parts of Texas is already a dual-language culture. This is not a new thing. If you walk through the graveyards in border towns like McAllen, you'll find rank on rank of gravestones with Mexican names dating from the eighteenth century. The people, Mexican and North American were just there. It was the border that moved, sweeping back and forth from one side of them to the other.
Texas is not the only part of the US where this multi-cultural, dual-language issue arises. In California, the most common male name given at birth is Juan. For the US as a whole, the Bureau of the Census estimates that Hispanics will outnumber African-Americans by 2005.
All this is happening as the US seeks to define its role as a partner and trading partner in the wider world. US citizens are finding a need to expand their language and cultural horizons both domestically and in the wider world. The web only makes this internationalization more intense.
Already companies like Dell and Amazon have websites for several different countries with different language and currencies. Search tools, like Yahoo, have German and French and other versions. And the firm StatMarket reports that 55% of web traffic now originates outside the US. The clear trend is toward a more international web and world. Whether we're ready for that is an open question.
On February 12, 1996, my first grandson, Teddy was born. When I got home from the hospital, I fired off an email to friends of mine around the world. I asked them to send me a copy of that day's newspaper from their town. The speed and reach of the net made that project possible.
The first replies came back within hours. In days, newspapers started to arrive from all over the world. My friend Max Hutchins in Australia sent Teddy a boomerang along with the paper. My friend Jeff sent the Times of London, bearing a stamp that said, "Please do not remove from Reading Room."
The stack of papers grew till it was almost waist high. Teddy has got extra credit for the rest of his life.
But that's nothing compared with what happened to Ms Forrest's sixth grade class in Taylorsville, in Alexander County in western North Carolina. Last December first they started a class project called "Around the World via Email." Thirty-two emails went out. Each one asked the recipient to respond to the class and pass the request on.
Before two hours had gone by, there was an email from Japan and several from different US states. Then more. And still more. There were so many emails that the mailbox was stuffed to capacity. So many that even with help from the fifth grade, the children fell farther and farther behind in their answers.
So the project that was supposed to run through April first was called off after a month because the response was simply overwhelming.
As of Friday, emails had been tallied from all fifty states. Emails have also been recorded from 83 countries at last count. But that number is rising daily, if not hourly as the children work their way through the backlog..
There are 29 from Japan and eleven from Russia. Places like Kazakhstan and Uganda and the United Arab Emirates are represented.
For Ms Forrest's sixth grade the world is bigger now than it was. It's also more human. The children in that town have been touched by people all over the world. The net made that learning possible.
That is one challenge this technology lays before us. With the net we can be citizens of the world, no matter where we are. We can reach out and communicate with our brothers and sisters who live in places whose names we can barely pronounce. We can share ourselves with them and receive their sharing in return.
I do not share the illusions of those who believe that if we just get to know each other better, war will go away and peace will reign. History tells me that evil often stalks the earth in the clothes of ambition and greed. It tells me that as long as there is human nature, there will be some humans who will want to be tyrants, that those who value freedom will need to oppose them, and that the price of freedom will continue to be paid in blood.
So I am not after Utopia. But I think the net gives us tools we have never had before to reach out to each other, to understand each other, to allow ways for individuals to reach across the arbitrary lines of governments and through historical hatreds to find common cause. I think we can reach out to each other in new ways. If we do that, and if we really work at it, maybe we can make the world a better place for all of us.
This feature appeared on 26 February 2001
