If I Were Queen of the Universe: My Royal List of Demands
But if I were queen of the universe, this is what I'd want to see:
- Recognition that "leader of the free world" is not the same thing as "leader of the earth." For most of human history, we have lived with the possibility that some people far away from us could make decisions and take actions that negatively affect us. This has not changed, and the notion that globalization has changed this is an illusion.
-Building on this recognition, the acknowledgment that when we collaborate as peers to save something on which all our lives depend, we must trust others to make the best decisions they can given the information they have, even when we are not watching.
-To date, globalization has largely consisted of two kinds of processes - one is straightforward exploitation, and the other is a weird effort to bring democracy and the end of race and gender based oppression to countries that are not "civilized" enough, weird because it claims to be a explicitly anti-imperialist project, so it blames colonialist countries while it imitates colonialist countries. The "global south" is not much better for having been introduced to the 24 hour news cycle of the "global north." the encounters the West has had with developing countries to date have often been terribly mismanaged. We need to recognize the simple truth that though the Other is terrifying to encounter, this fear cannot be the organizing principle of our foreign policy.
-In order to create a more humane foreign policy, we need to acknowledge that there cannot be universal human rights if there is not a universal human. Margaret Thatcher once said, "There is no society, only individual men and their families." To my eyes, this has been the fundamental view taken by the United States and Western Europe towards globalization. Denying that there is a universal human is often labeled as progressive, but it is mainly used to avoid taking responsibility for the people we are harming. We need to look at the people we don't like because they are different from us and the people we don't like because they're actually assholes and the people we can't afford to like because we want their stuff, and recognize there is something true about them that is also true about us, and that true thing entitles them to rights we would like to deny them.
-We need to deconstruct the business class, and reintroduce production and service as economic cornerstones, instead of financial speculation. If we reassessed the financial worth of a job (salary) by its usefulness to the community, I think that would be a big start. If we could introduce more cooperative models for businesses via tax credits and incentives, and require all high schoolers to do a year of service (instead of military) before they went to college, I think that would be good too. I think a better process of globalization would be putting our global values to good use to make our communities better where are.
-We need to transform globalization into instituting our global values in our local communities, instead of exploiting global communities for local value.
-Embrace plurality! YOUR QUEEN COMMANDS IT. There are: different learning styles, different strengths, different sexualities, different cultures, different outlooks, different hopes, different everrrrything. EMBRACE IT.