I am spending too much time away from blogging about life here in our area, but I will return to that shortly.

Here is a link to a post by Judah Grudstein on the World Politics Review blog.  In it he discusses the fact that what's going on now in Gaza and Israel is a proxy for a larger "negotiation."  I mentioned in a previous post a similar point: these players and watchers don't see they are playing a superficial game of chess without the faintest awareness, it seems, that real people are suffering.  It reminds me of the old board game Diplomacy where we moved pieces across a cardboard map of the world.  I am currently reading The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaraya.  I always liked him on CNN and elsewhere.  He sees international issues from a nuanced perspective, as close to an objective one as is possible for humans, I think.  And from what is referred to as a macro point of view, he has great understanding.  But he, too, unfortunately, is playing a board game.  I think we do this because the world is so jampacked, it is frightening to see below the surfaces Tom Friedman and Zakaraya and others play on.

But we must.  Here where we live in Mexico, we can easily visit very poor, very rural areas.  In some of them, there are schools which receive their lessons via television satellite; in most, every man I think has a baseball cap, and buses wend their way up roads mere cars blanche at. So yes, globalization has penetrated.  But the existence of jobs in the state of Coahuila has little to do with lives far up in the mountains besides providing it with souvenirs and hints which are the hooks which can end up breaking apart families instead of healing them.

The globalized world has the tools and materials actually to "lift every boat" at least a little bit.  What we need is wisdom.