The World Is Flat

“Who's that?” I asked. That was his girlfriend, he explained, slightly red-faced. So there was his wallet-Yasser Arafat on one page, whom he was ready to die for, and his girlfriend on the other, whom he wanted to live for. A few minutes later, one of his colleagues, Anas Assaf, became emotional. He was the only one in college, an engineering student at Bir Zeit University near Ramallah. After breathing fire about also being willing to die for Arafat, he began waxing eloquent about how much he wanted to go to the University of Memphis, where his uncle lived, “to study engineering.” Unfortunately, he said, he could not get a visa into the United States now. Like his colleague, Assaf was ready to die for Yasser Arafat, but he wanted to live for the University of Memphis.

These were good young men, not terrorists. But their role models were all angry men, and these young men spent a lot of their time imagining how to unleash their anger, not realizing their potential. Abraham George, by contrast, produced a different context and a different set of teacher role models for those untouchable children in his school, and together they planted in his students the seeds of a very different imagination. We must have more Abraham Georges-everywhere-by the thousands: people who gaze upon a classroom of untouchable kids and not only see the greatness in each of them but, more important, get them to see the greatness in themselves while endowing them with the tools to bring that out.

After our little typing race at the Shanti Bhavan school, I went around the classroom and asked all the children-most of whom had been in school, and out of a life of open sewers, for only three years-what they wanted to be when they grew up. These were eight-year-old Indian kids whose parents were untouchables. It was one of the most moving experiences of my life. Their answers were as follows: “an astronaut,” “a doctor,” “a pediatrician,” “a poetess,” “physics and chemistry,” “a scientist and an astronaut,” “a surgeon,” “a detective,” “an author.”

All dreamers in action-not martyrs in waiting.

Let me close with one last point. My own daughter went off to college in the fall of 2004, and my wife and I dropped her off on a warm September day. The sun was shining. Our daughter was full of excitement. But I can honestly say it was one of the saddest days of my life. And it wasn't just the dad-and-mom-dropping-their-eldest-child-off-at-school thing. No, something else bothered me. It was the sense that I was dropping my daughter off into a world that was so much more dangerous than the one she had been born into. I felt like I could still promise my daughter her bedroom back, but I couldn't promise her the world-not in the carefree way that I had explored it when I was her age. That really bothered me. Still does.

The flattening of the world, as I have tried to demonstrate in this book, has presented us with new opportunities, new challenges, new partners but also, alas, new dangers, particularly as Americans. It is imperative that we find the right balance among all of these. It is imperative that we be the best global citizens that we can be-because in a flat world, if you don't visit a bad neighborhood, it might visit you. And it is imperative that while we remain vigilant to the new threats, we do not let them paralyze us. Most of all, though, it is imperative that we nurture more people with the imaginations of Abraham George and Fadi Ghandour. The more people with the imagination of 11/9, the better chance we have of staving off another 9/11.1 refuse to settle for a world that gets smaller in the wrong sense, in the sense that there are fewer and fewer places an American can go without a second thought and fewer and fewer foreigners feeling comfortable about coming to America.

To put it another way, the two greatest dangers we Americans face are an excess of protectionism-excessive fears of another 9/11 that prompt us to wall ourselves in, in search of personal security-and excessive fears of competing in a world of 11/9 that prompt us to wall ourselves off, in search of economic security. Both would be a disaster for us and for the world. Yes, economic competition in the flat world will be more equal and more intense. We Americans will have to work harder, run faster, and become smarter to make sure we get our share. But let us not underestimate our strengths or the innovation that could explode from the flat world when we really do connect all of the knowledge centers together. On such a flat earth, the most important attribute you can have is creative imagination-the ability to be the first on your block to figure out how all these enabling tools can be put together in new and exciting ways to create products, communities, opportunities, and profits. That has always been America's strength, because America was, and for now still is, the world's greatest dream machine.