Oftentimes, my writings and conversations on mobility suggest that I think more about others' movement than my own. Indonesian women who work in Hong Kong for years on exploitative contracts; Nepali taxi drivers in Dubai; the impact of temporary work visas on the cohesion of an American community. The truth is that my mind is often filled, too, with thoughts about my own jet-setting behavior. Lately, I’m trying harder to connect these two conversations—the external or observational, and the personal.
I’ve reached a moment in my life when transcontinental travel feels practically quotidian. I’ve spent about two of the last four years abroad, even as this time in my life is, on paper, dedicated primarily to obtaining my Bachelor’s degree. In admitting to this recent personal history, I remain conscious of how it sounds and what it means. Even as I have no trouble separating myself from the likes of international businessmen who groggily struggle to remember which global city they’ve awoken in, I nonetheless recognize that my lifestyle over the last four years has, in some ways, been rootless. Time with family is perhaps too often slipped in between other, “worldly” endeavors, and the addiction to abroad too often sends my mind wandering from the present to the next plane ticket. Of course, I’m not ungrateful for my opportunities. Global travel (of my variety) is privilege at its most extreme. Without the backing of a rare scholarship, the support of a rare family (emotional, yes, rather than financial, but then again it is a global rarity for a family not to require a financial contribution from an educated, 22-year-old male), or the immigration channel-greasing that comes with an American passport, none of my studying, interning, or wandering abroad would have been possible. I’m not oblivious to the irony that, while one of the things I love most about living in places like India or Indonesia is the ethic of frugality, the simple act of my stepping on a international flight is lavish.
All of these reflections and reconciliations aside, one of the gifts I know travel in diverse settings has given me is an ability to adapt. It takes me very little time to feel at home in environments radically different from my actual home. This kind of adaptability extends from small, unimportant habits—like a mastery of the squat toilet—to more significant determinants of culture and society—for instance, an easy acceptance of “jam karet” (rubber time) in Indonesia. I will admit, I derive perhaps too much pleasure from the remarks of Indonesian friends like “Greg sudah seperti orang Indonesia!” (Greg is already like Indonesian people!). To me, this adaptability, and others’ recognition of it, produces a kind of flexibility of belonging. I can go many places throughout the world and “fit in” well enough to feel incorporated, keeping in mind the privileges already mentioned.
Flexible belonging is fun, and exciting. I won’t pretend that I’m past that excitement or have risen above it. After all, it is still new to me. I’m only an “experienced” traveler post-2007. But lately I’ve been thinking about the difference between this kind of ‘internationalism’ and global citizenship. Global citizenship, even as the term gets thrown around loosely at high school cultural fairs, has to mean something more than this fun ‘adaptability’ I’ve identified. It also has to mean more than its counterpart, and perhaps the hollowest term of all, “global awareness.”
Citizenship is usually understood in contractual terms. But what contract do “global citizens” engage in? To me, this kind of contract is different; there is no international “state” or even an international “society” at the other end. It boomerangs back to us as individuals. Ironically then, global citizenship is hyper-personalized; it is a contract we engage in with ourselves, or for some perhaps a relationship we engage in with God. On one side of the contract is an understanding of (more realistically, an earnest attempt to understand) how our everyday decisions—what we say, what we buy, what we eat, what we drive, what we blog—reverberate throughout the world, as we know they do. That is to say, a global citizen first must understand how his boomerang spins out into the foggy sky. People like Robert Spencer, who refuses to acknowledge his blog’s role in fueling the ideology of the recent Norwegian bomber, fail to satisfy this first condition of the global citizen’s contract, fail to achieve what might be equated with “awareness.” They’ve stopped watching the boomerang of their actions in the world, stopped trying to count the ripples their stones make in the water.
While this first side of the contract is hard enough, answering it, fulfilling the other side of the contract, is harder. To me, catching that boomerang requires standing responsible for how our lifestyles and choices echo in the larger world. It requires lining up our reverberations with our values. In my life, sometimes there are channels, paths to take, where impact falls in harmony with my personal values. I can choose to buy less. I can choose to smile at strangers. I can’t choose, though, to elect someone to Congress whose votes will be guided more by his or her own personal morality than by corrosive special interests. I can’t drive a vehicle that doesn’t indirectly contribute to massive geopolitical and environmental injustices. Globalization has made commodities and services readily available. But it has so tangled our web of impact, so complicated our systems of exchange and participation, that finding ways to live in the world consistent with our values can feel impossible. Rather than watching our stone shape ripples in a pond, we’re dropping glaciers into the sea. We’ve thrown our boomerang halfway across the world. This is perhaps the most dangerous thing about globalization. Its complexity becomes a shield, a way for us to absolve ourselves of accountability. This absolution is what a global citizen rejects. Hard as it may be, a global citizen strives to understand his ripples, and where there is no channel for moral action, he struggles to forge one.
I’m certainly not yet a global citizen by this definition. My fun, flexible belonging is dramatically easier. Maybe though, if globalization is to be a phenomenon I respond to in my life, rather than gape at, this type of citizenship--ironically personal and endlessly complex--should be a standard I strive for.
