My life. Thoughts on globalization.
As the sun first shines in through my Michigan window, it is shining its last of a hot day in Australia. I wake up and have breakfast: waffles made with mix from Seattle, butter from Boston, syrup from Grand Rapids, blueberries picked locally by Mexican laborers, and a “Belgian” waffle maker whose maker’s in China. The waffles sit on German plates resting on a table put together in Malaysia. Coffee from Costa Rica, sweetened by cream and sugar stored in Peruvian pottery, tops off the meal. Glancing at a painting my wife purchased at a market in Guayaquil, Ecuador, I head out the door.
I pull out of my driveway in a truck built in Venezuela by an American company. My wife’s car, manufactured in Tennessee by a Japanese firm, is still in the garage. I tune into a British Broadcasting Corporation report with news just in from Iran, via twitter. At the office, I check email from an alumni board member living in Germany and another on a business trip in Brazil. I share campus with faculty and students from over 30 countries around the world, many of them connected in real-time to over half a billion people via social networks like Facebook, with 70% of its users living outside the United States. My mobile phone rings. It’s designed by a Canadian firm, manufactured in Mexico, powered by a Japanese battery and banned in the United Arab Emirates. It’s my wife. She’s calling from her Korean made device on a network owned by a British multinational.
After work I feed my daughter a bottle made in the United Kingdom while she sits on a high-chair made in China. A north wind from Canada blows in the window and I relax by reading a magazine published by a company with offices in New York, Chicago, Miami, Madrid, Milan, Tokyo, London and Paris. My computer is streaming an Italian radio station as the sun sets over Michigan. Meanwhile, a new day dawns in India.
