How the World Sees the US

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Creative Commons License photo credit: celebdu
I’m back from Ethiopia and Las Vegas – talk about culture shock. I have a stack of half finished blog posts and a cold and the cold is winning. So in the interim, I’m going to post pointers to some interesting sites. (Doesn’t take too many brain cells which are not doing so well at the moment!)

First is a collection of music videos from the world music site, Calabash, which give a musical perspective on one of our US presidential candidates, Barak Obama. To get a sense of how the world sees the US, listen to the lyrics on viva música!: Obama – The WorldBeat Album.

When I work outside of my home country, people often ask me my political views. Trust is given or withheld depending on my answer. Regardless of your politics, it is really important to have a sense of how the world views the US because it is a global society and we can’t sit isolated from the world. In some ways, we are very good at playing out in the world. In others, we have a lot of ground to cover.

If you are a US voter, please think about this as you make your selection. How the world sees and understands us matters. Like it or not, that starts with our leaders! However, it doesn’t stop there. What we do to respond to the terrible losses in Burma or China matter as much as our response to losses in Oklahoma. So let’s be part of the world from the top down and the bottom up.

One thought on “How the World Sees the US”

  1. How true. Sometimes I’m mistaken for a Canadian by Europeans and that makes life much easier.

    In Europe (probably much of the rest of the world – but I don’t have much experience traveling there), there seems to be a great hunger for a more moral American government. They still like much of America and its people, but a continuation of the imperial America only will bring bad.

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