Winter Break Blog #1

A year of our world in review: our earth has made yet another full orbit around the sun, what have we been up to on it? Even with the global economy taking a spin, developing countries around the world are growing at astonishing rates. Brazil, China and India to name a few. The world's tallest building is now in Dubai, the largest movie industry is India's Bollywood not Hollywood and the world's largest plane is made by Airbus in Europe. These changes are unsettling to some Americans, who's country has had economic, political and cultural hegemony on the world for over a century. But as writer Fareed Zakaria suggests Americans should not be afraid that this is the down fall of America but rather the rise of the rest of the world. The percentage of the world's people living on $1 a day is declining from 40% in 1981 to 18% in 2004. Our news media tells us that we live in dark dangerous times fraught with terrorism, unstable states, financial panics, outsourcing and illegal immigration, but how dangerous is our world really? Researchers at the University of Maryland have found that global violence is at its lowest levels since the 1950's. Harvard Professor Steven Pinker concludes that we are probably living "in the most peaceful time of our species' existence." America must bring these rising nations into the global system.This new year America must remain open and flexible and be the melting pot of ideas it has always been.