Around this time of the year, Americans think about their collective histories and what makes this country great. The United States truly is a great country with opportunities not found in many other countries. My family moved to the United States in the 1970s to take advantage of the opportunities and freedoms for a better life.
I am very grateful to be an American myself. I had the opportunity to grow up in a nice home, get a decent education, have a career as a journalist and start a business. There are not many places in the world where someone like me could do the things that I do.
Sometimes we Americans take for granted these freedoms and opportunities. I have a great deal of friends from around the world who want to come to this country to live, and they spend months training themselves for the naturalization test. As a US citizen born on American soil, I never had to take this test. This past weekend I was talking to my friend Rita from Eritrea about her upcoming test. She came here as a political refugee five years ago with her husband and 4 children.
“You Americans have it so easy,” she said. “I had to study for this test for three months. You just have to be born here and you automatically get citizenship.”
So I took the official 25-question self test online and another test from the Atlantic just for fun, and I did pretty good.
Actually, I am in the minority. According to a study, only one in three native-born Americans would fail the civics portion of the naturalization test, compared to 97.5 percent of immigrants that pass the test. If the pass rate was 7 out of ten, about half the native-born population would fail.
I went out to Iftar dinner at a restaurant last week with a group of friends to celebrate Ramadan. About an hour into the meal, we were having a great conversation about why we still like to have face to face interaction in the new “digital me” age. It was then I realized that we were the only people in the restaurant actually talking to each other.
The other patrons were all sitting quietly eating their meals while gazing at their mobile devices. Even the waiters were taking out their mobiles in between busing tables. Now mind you, I am guilty of looking at my mobile when I am in restaurants too, but that is usually if I am eating out by myself, and not when I am with someone. There were groups of people sitting at these tables last week looking at phones instead of talking to each other. Who knows, maybe they were texting each other! I would much rather talk to the actual human being in front of me than be on the mobile. I love technology as much as the next person, but even I have my limits. With all the good that technology and the Internet has done for the world,there have also been some bad things to come out of it as well, namely the decrease in face to face social interaction.
There are a lot of people today who have so immersed themselves in the digital world that they have forgotten how to interact with other in the analog world. I remember back in the “old days” of 10 years ago when you could strike up a conversation with someone on a train or bus. Now when you travel on public transportation, there is complete silence because everyone is plugged into their headsets and phones.
A couple of months ago I was in Washington DC for a client meeting. I got lost while walking to meet the client, and I asked the first guy I saw on the street for directions. “Don’t you have GPS on your phone,” he said. Yeah, I guess I could have used my mobile to find the location, but my first instinct was to ask an actual human being first.
And then you have the people who think you are suppose to live 24/7 online, like the ones who get mad if you don’t respond to their email, text or Facebook messages as soon as they are received. Or the people who get upset when you don’t post every single thing you are doing in your life online.
I recently discovered this show on MTV called Catfish, which delves into the fascinating fake world of online dating. There are people on this show who have significant others they have only met through Facebook!
This unhealthy relationship we have with our digital devices is actually creating more stress on our social and cultural interactions. I do a digital detox regularly just so I keep my life in check. Here’s what I do:
Turn off your phone: I tell clients, friends and family that my mobile is turned off at 7pm ET daily and turned back on at 7am ET the next day. If it is an emergency, clients can call my business line and family and friends call the landline (yeah, I still have one of those things…) As a sidenote, it’s a good idea to shut down mobiles regularly to preserve the battery and extend the life of the phone.
Limit your social media use: The constant stream of tweets, Instagram images and blog posts can become a distraction and limit your ability to do other things effectively. Schedule time to do the social media stuff for 30 minutes a day and get on with your life.
Limit your email use: The same thing goes for email. Unless it is work-related, put a daily intake limit on email communications. Even if it is work-related email, only respond to time sensitive messages first.
Limit your screen viewing: If you have a job where you have to be in front of a computer all day like me, that can be tough, but you can always take a coffee or lunch break away from your desk. But what about when you are at home doing a binge marathon of the latest Netflix series. As much as I like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, I limit myself to two or three hours of screen viewing a day on TVs and computers.
Read a print book: I only use my tablet for reading books that are 500 pages or more, and even then I limit my digital reading to a couple of hours to reduce eye strain. If it is a small print book, I don’t mind carrying it in my bag. Also, unlike tablets, print books are crash-proof.
Set up a detox event: Arrange a time to do something non-techie with family or friends where they have to surrender their devices for a few hours, like going for a jog, bike riding, or a picnic. It’s time to put the real social back into social networking!
Piggybacking on last week’s post on the Caribbean economy, this week I wanted to take an artistic perspective on island politics. I am a big fan of Kehinde Wiley’s work, and I always like finding an opportunity to talk about him. I had brunch last weekend with a couple of friends who were not familiar with his work. I told them that he is kind of an artistic interpreter for the hip-hop generation.
He is known for taking black and brown people and putting them in traditionally European portraiture. For the last few years he has been doing “The World Stage” series, where he paints poor people mostly from developing countries in heroic poses; poses that have historically been reserved for the privileged class. The portraits really make you think about history, race, class and power.
Here is World Stage Jamaica:
And here is World Stage Haiti (The book for this part of the series comes out 23 June!)
Finally, his new exciting project, An Economy of Grace, focuses on black women:
This week over at Global Wire Associates, we took the position that an embargo-free Cuba would yield to better access to basic infrastructure and ICT needs and an improved economy. This leads into a larger conversation about improving the economies throughout the Caribbean.
President Obama’s recent trip to Jamaica put a spotlight on the many pressing issues affecting the region. The president met with the economic development group Caribbean Community, or CARICOM, on supporting better governance and security through creating more opportunities with sustainable energy. Energy is a huge issue in the region and it seems to be an issue that both Washington and the CARICOM Secretariat can agree on.
Established in 1973 with the signing of the Treaty of Chaguaramas, CARICOM is a group the represents 15 mostly English-speaking countries and serves to provide economic integration and set foreign policy objections for the region. As prime minister of Jamaica at the time, Michael Manley was a strong advocate for CARICOM, and felt that all these post-colonial small islands had more power if they came together in one group to advocate for their own needs and break away from their former colonizers.
“It is critical that the Third World should create its own institutions for savings and development,” Manley said in his controversial book The Politics of Change. “In addition we must develop policies of investment in projects that reflect Third World priorities. It is also important that Third World countries begin to exchange information about technology since… their own technological discoveries are often more likely to be relevant to each other’s problems than the discoveries of more advanced nations. Thus beginning with Caribbean regionalism, a Jamaican foreign policy must be Third World in its economic orientation.”
In the 1970s Manley was an outspoken democratic socialist who was friends with Fidel Castro, much to the chagrin to Washington. During the height of the cold war, Manley had no problem with having an “open foreign policy” that looked beyond political ideology and was willing to trade with communist countries if it served the need. “All countries that are involved in trade do so from the posture of their own political systems and it is a betrayal of national self-interest to fail to seek out in the world at large those points of advantage to one’s own economy,” he writes. However, Manley also said refusing trade on the basis of diplomatic pressure was appropriate at the time with South Africa, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and Portugal to protest racism and colonialism.
So CARICOM was born out of a need to organized around the region’s interests and set forth this optimistic view of the future. Fast forward to 1989 when Manley rewrote his book’s epilogue with a softer, more capitalism-friendly tone of wanting to work more with private enterprise. Two decades into CARICOM’s existence and many felt it was living up to expectations. It was also around this time that some Caribbean countries started to be more vocal about creating a single economic market to make it easier to trade and work in other member countries.
In 2001 the Treaty of Chaguaramas was updated with these new objectives and thus created the CARICOM Single Market and Economy which became effective 2006.
However, this week a couple of prominent players in the region’s economy have sharply criticized CARICOM and it relevance. William Mahfood, president of the Private Sector Organisation Jamaica, said that CARICOM has failed to accomplish anything.
“The heads of Government go off to wherever it is, and over the last 20 years that I’ve looked at it; hardly anything has been accomplished out of Caricom. We have a single form for immigration now. But what else has happened?” he said.
Former Jamaican prime minister Bruce Golding said that while it is still important to have a strategic alliance in the region, CARICOM has not lived up to expectations. “… CARICOM member countries should face the reality that the lofty, far-reaching goals set out in the revised Chaguaramas cannot be achieved because the political framework that it requires can never be achieved,” writes Golding in an editorial.
I gather from this that CARICOM is really comprised of 15 countries that have very diverse economies and needs today. What does economic integration really mean in 2015 with rapid globalization? There are now countries wondering out loud if they should stay in CARICOM.
The town-hall President Obama hosted while in Jamaica was really telling of this divide, especially during the Q&A. But it also shows that future leaders of these countries are thinking about these problems and potential solutions, especially in regards to Cuba joining CARICOM. (The Q&A starts at 13:50)
Around this time of the year, Americans think about their collective histories and what makes this country great. The United States truly is a great country with opportunities not found in many other countries. My family moved to the United States in the 1970s to take advantage of the opportunities and freedoms for a better life.
