We are the Champions!

The crowd was crazy big. 1.5 billion People watched worldwide. The sound was powerful and deafening. Thousands of people stood together singing along while Freddy Mercury and Queen performed the song “We are the Champions.” The venue was London England at the Live Aid concert in 1985. I recently viewed the performance while in my English class. It was awesome! I got chills just watching it on a huge screen not really there…it would have been awesome to be there.

My English professor, Mr. Burton, shared that he felt the Live Aid concert was a watershed event that threw the world spinning into globalization for better or worse. Professor Burton shares his definition of globalization in his book, Artists of the Floating World, “Globalization has become a seductive catchword to describe the increased flow of capital (both financial and human), commodities, and creative ideas around the world in the last half of the twentieth century and early part of the twenty-first century.”(125)

 So globalization is a sharing of many things globally… Is this a good thing or a bad thing?  Some would argue both sides. On one side there are opponents to globalization who argue that events like 9/11 are a result of globalization. On the other side are people who believe that globalization is giving other countries a chance to improve their standard of living.

For the last several months we have been discussing different narratives in our English class. The main topic we have been thinking and writing on is people stuck in the “floating world” that is, “where cultures converge and collide in unexpected, exciting, and dangerous ways.” (Burton 9) Globalization has been an underlying narrative that could be applicable to the floating world. From my perspective there is no difference between globalization and people of the floating world. As the world becomes more connected people are bound to get displaced and cultures are certainly going to collide.

The only thing we can evaluate is if this is good or bad. Two authors that we’ve read up on have both experienced personally the floating world and write about it. Bessie Head and Bharati Mukherjee are both authors who have no set culture identity. Bessie Head was born it a mental institute, is half black half white and has always felt like an artist in the floating world. And the character in the book she wrote titled, A Question of Power, is the same way. In Mukherjee’s book, Jasmine, the main character is an Indian immigrant, who longs to perfectly assimilate into the American culture, running from her past. I would argue that both artists in some way argue that globalization is good. Head’s character, Elizabeth is thrown into a different town and way of living and gets healthy as a result. In Mukherjee’s book the main character, Jasmine, finds happiness through losing her old identity (being Indian) and finding a new one (American).

It seems to me that globalization is inevitable. It is up to all of us how we take it. It can either be an awesome time getting to know new people and ways of doing things. Or it can be a horrific clash of cultures. Tolerance must be our creed leading into our future. If the whole world could simply feel and believe the message at the Live Aid concert in 1985 we all would be champions of a bold new world.