Bursting Your Bubble: In the end, all that’s left is us
Running this column has been an immense honor and privilege. The opportunity to write in such a welcoming space for a wide and deeply impassioned readership is a rare one that I often doubt I will ever receive again.
I remember, back in July or August, riding my high horse into the Daily Trojan opinion section’s Google Form application with the idea for this column in mind. I knew how frustrating it felt to identify with a country whose politics so drastically shaped my family, but was otherwise completely irrelevant here in the United States. I also knew there were many others like me who felt the same way. This column was a way to relieve myself of that frustration, and while I won’t pretend to have been some harbinger of representation for all the blank-hyphen-Americans and international folks of this great University, I do hope this column has brought some degree of comfort to you as well.
I would like to end this column — at least for the semester — with a couple FAQs and some final thoughts.
What’s even “outside Western interests” anyway?
It is true that the West has a stake in almost anywhere the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening, in terms of resources and economic opportunities. What they couldn’t care less about are the people and the infrastructures that inhabit those places — that is, so long as said people don’t appoint governments the West dislikes (see: Syria, Costa Rica, Vietnam, Cuba, etc.). My intent with the column is to bring the focus back to the people, to whom I believe the power and attention do and should belong.
It is also a flaw of news outlets that they often rely on governments to be reliable representations of their people. Look no further than the concussion-inducing coverage of last Tuesday’s midterm elections: So much talk about this seat and that seat in the Senate and House, while voters are treated as mere numbers and statistics in a larger politicians’ game of chess. I couldn’t help but notice a severe disconnect between the passion and urgency of those pundits and the general apathy of every other sane American. Earlier, I wrote of elections as being this lunatic versus that lunatic, and this time was no different. The “second highest voter turnout among voters under 30 in at least the past three decades” means nothing, really: We have only seen the lunatics that will take office if we didn’t at least do something about it.
How do you conduct research for columns when most news sources we consider to be reputable are mostly Western outlets? What even is a reputable news source?
This is something I continue to struggle with. Foreign affairs has a steep learning curve. The limited English-language outlets that do cover it either obsess over Russia and China, as does the aptly named Foreign Affairs magazine, or they devote a singular correspondent to an entire country’s politics, only for their articles to get buried in a wave of more relevant news. And on what grounds do I cross-examine the various reports and claims these outlets make, especially when I can’t read a native-language newspaper?
I had a pitch about Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, having an efficient metro system where trains come every seven minutes at most, despite being nine months into its war with Russia. You may notice the hyperlink directs to a page on the Kyiv Metro’s official website, which is obviously in Ukrainian.
I cannot read, write or speak Ukrainian in any sense. So while the subject piqued my interest, I knew that to find the 10 to 12 other sources in Ukrainian that I would need to write a full-fledged article would be a suicide mission. What’s worse is that no Ukrainian outlet would even report on this, since Ukrainians are perfectly accustomed to having a functional, efficient metro system. The only reason I’d even found out about the metro was thanks to a Hayden Clarkin from New York, who on Sept. 20 tweeted, “I want to stress that Kyiv’s off peak frequency while being invaded is better than nearly all of America’s transit systems during peak. I’m genuinely at a loss of words [sic].”
So my final answer: Reputability is subjective, and is something I hope to outsource in the future to people who can speak on the subject.
Final thoughts
The world seems to shrink smaller and smaller by the day, as we globalize and our bubbles mix and crash and pop like we’ve never seen before. But if there’s one thing you take from this, I hope it’s that the world is also, still, unfathomably large. Every community — be it town, tribe, city, state, nation or continent — has its own problems in addition to our collective ones. Those problems are often a result of the collective — the mistakes and horrors inflicted by other nations and entities on our own.
As we struggle to make a name and a living for ourselves, fresh out of college to wherever we may go, we also bear the responsibility of being a global citizen, and that means rectifying the mistakes of our past, and acknowledging that our every action reverberates in communities around the world. The future of our species depends on it.
Jonathan Park is a sophomore writing about international politics outside of Western interests. He is also an assistant news editor for the Daily Trojan. His column, “Bursting Your Bubble,” runs every other Tuesday.