On the campus of Emerald Heights International School in Indore, India, I felt something different. I discussed climate change with Barazza groups at day and sang Bollywood songs with my dormmates at night. I met new friends from South Africa, Germany, and Malaysia and connected with students from my hometown in China. Among the over 1000 students from over 50 countries who attended the Round Square International Conference, I didn’t feel an “us” vs “them”. Everyone were equally strangers, eager to meet each other. It was a place devoid of alliances, platitudes, and assumptions. Everyone brought their background to the table along with a smile. It was a place of discovery.
While I was there, isolationism peaked in both India and the United States. The Trump and Modi administration both championed nationalist policies at the cost of international cooperation. Unfortunately, my experience at the conference was an exception to the global status quo rather than the rule. What are the forces that drive us apart, and how might we break them down?
Wars show the rawest of human intentions. In WWI, studies have shown that most soldiers intentionally missed at the enemy, not actually wanting to kill them. How can a soldier kill when they know that the “enemy” is simply another human being? Realizing this, governments started using man-shaped training targets by WWII. On the Pacific front, the US government spreaded racist, anti-Asian rhetoric amongst the troops. This is how a government manipulates its people and builds barriers between nations. Of course, sometimes isolationism is necessary to some degree. Communities that we live in, whether that’d be our families, towns, or schools, depend on our people taking care of each other. In Chinese philosophy, one must take care of themselves before their family and their country. For political and economic benefit, American isolationism has hit all-time heights in recent years.
Just when we thought the world could not be more divided, the coronavirus pandemic hit. Unfortunately, the barrier that governments put up has proven to be dangerous. In the war against the coronavirus, Asian Americans feel besieged every day from racist rhetoric. The Trump administration has blurred the lines between attacking a nation’s government and its ethnic people. The absence of empathy shows precisely why a global education is so vital.
Now is precisely the time when nations need to work together, from vaccine distribution to the climate. With my school’s Round Square club, I started hosting Global Community Conversations (GCC), a biweekly meeting that seeks to replicate the elusive (and now impossible) Round Square experience. We have had 14 conversations so far, each with about 30 attendants from around the world and a unique topic. During lockdown, we shared our country’s COVID-response, debated lockdown policies, and consoled each other. Once, we discussed how our nations may work together to build equity in primary education. After the conversation, a girl from Bangladesh remarked that she wanted to start her own school in the future to promote local culture, not just the European history required for international exams. Through these conferences, I’ve come to realize that people to people connections are the key to fostering a global connection. “The great part about GCC,” an attendant from Peru remarked, “is that we could connect with each other without the government or the media.”
That being said, while becoming more globally competent, we should not forget our neighbors. Early on in the pandemic, I saw my favorite small businesses in my hometown in China fall one by one: the restaurant where I spent my birthdays, the tailor downstairs, and the barber shop around the corner. Inevitably, the same tragedy happened in Cambridge, USA. These were not just businesses, but economic empowerment, dreams, and memories. Small businesses struggled to receive PPP loans funding while large businesses were bailed out by grants. Globalism and “McWorld” should not erase local livelihoods and culture.
Amidst isolationism, we must seek to communicate and collaborate across the barriers between us, and by doing so, breaking them down. I’ve learned that the answer to isolationism is not an opposing ideology or concept, but rather how much empathy we have for our neighbors and other global citizens. The purest form of empathy can only come from conversation, and incidentally, the prominence of Zoom has laid the foundation for more people-to-people connections to the future. We have the means to change the world for the better — we just have to make that choice.
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