"World" by Ernie Stanley

Imagine your world being the vast forests, trees stretched to the sky, more cosmic than that which they almost touch. Nowhere is the sky untouched by green sprawl, and very rarely do you even see the tops of the giants which surround you. It is near impossible to have sight venture more than a few dozen yards, impeded by the massive trunks of the forest. Your ambiance is that of insects, frogs, colorful birds flying and flitting about and the occasional and irreverent mammal. Technology is confined to tools of survival and the written word is something unheard of. This is how the indigenous of the Albertine Rift live. These tribes are tucked away from the troubles that plague the “countries” which reside around it though not untouched by it.
Is it impossible to imagine the life or just hard to picture? Perhaps this can be the benchmark of your imaginative possibilities: Can you look down the road and see the telephone poles, the massive trunks of society as tiny objects dotting the tiny landscape or is it simply an optical illusion of something much more massive? We’ve certainly been taught the later, through written word and the ability to experience it as such. However, the native tribes of the Congo have not had the same indoctrination and their perception tells them that things so far away are actually simply small, and easily traveled to.

Vision of “far away” appears to be an alien concept to the indigenous of the thickly populated rainforest. Having spent many years wondering the forests of the Appalachians, I can easily picture where this concept was lost, even the rivers wind out of sight quickly. However, even within these large stretches of woodland, the foundation of perception and the optical illusion of height vs. distance were ingrained in my mentality. We as a literate society, with our maps and books have easily formed a conceptualized memory of just how large the world is, not only around us, but as a whole. We picture the globe when we think “world” rather than what is imminent and tangible, what is right in front of us.

This begs the question of whether or not the mass globalization that literacy is surely behind has destroyed, at least somewhat the value we place in the very community we live. We’ve been taught, and mostly by commercialization of human contact, that we can keep in touch with the world at large, and yet we’ve forgotten how to say hello to our very neighbors. How much effort do we expend in order to maintain this vision of a global world, leaving to dust the imminent in front of us? How often do we waste time and stress over long distance familial and romantic relationships simply because it is now possible to do so? And how often do we ignore the fact that such relations are stressed simply because they are so far, yet reachable through the written and technological pathways? How many things right in front us and easily dealt with are refused of attention in the name of the distant, intangible and largely unrewarding? And finally why do we continue to remove ourselves from our imminent situations?

Do we put up with a global "World" simply because we can or because we have been convinced we should?