Thomas Friedman's article, 'Who Will Tell the People?', echoed through my subconscious since this past Sunday. It wasn't that what he wrote is true - I'm sure it is - but it is probably more true than what he wrote in context. It is the disconnect between representation and people that he has shown in the American context that floats the idea to sentience - as Richard Feynman would say, 'the same ideas keep coming back'. So it is with the reconnection of representation and people - the lifeblood of economies, democracy and legal entities that pay service, perhaps 50% of the lip, to people themselves. While marketers try to drag people kicking and screaming through speakers, televisions and computer monitors, so do the very people who would have us represented through them.

And from that tangent, there is much that could be said - that should be said - but probably won't be said by those with the rapt audience. It is that what needs to be said isn't being said, and not only in the United States - indeed, the economic strength of the United States has become cannibalistic, eating itself with seasonings of it's own growing (ibid):

We are not as powerful as we used to be because over the past three decades, the Asian values of our parents’ generation — work hard, study, save, invest, live within your means — have given way to subprime values: “You can have the American dream — a house — with no money down and no payments for two years.”

People wherever I am often tell me that I don't know because I haven't lived there all my life - a curse of my own itchy feet - but those same itchy feet have carried me through many places that are notably different and yet, under the surface, quite the same.

I learned very early in life that a bar by any other name is a bar, that a smile by any other name is a smile, and that democracy by any other name can be demonstrably shown to represent only those with the currency of our times. It doesn't matter which language you speak, it doesn't matter which place of worship you attend, it doesn't matter the geopolitical accident of your birth, and it most certainly doesn't matter the color of your skin.

All of these things have an effect on how the world is viewed, but despite our own best attempts to be objective through our prejudiced lives we see the same world with the circumspection we are permitted. And that circumspection doesn't come from staying in one place - it comes from being an outsider everywhere you go; geopolitics, finance and opportunity may give you a certain passport and citizenship that permit one more or less potential for circumspection. For lack of finance, I have had the geopolitical advantage with plenty of opportunities that I did not waste and I will continue not to waste.

The itchy feet have taken me all over the world - a world of commonalities. Where the poor are just as poor all over the world, though the number of poor varies. Where there is hunger and disease no matter where you go; all that varies is scale. Our nature and our own global culture lends itself toward looking at geopolitical solutions for geopolitical problems when the geopolitics themselves are at least a formative part of the problems themselves - the geopolitical connections are best described as economic pipelines where capitalist dreams of supply and demand pass through in some stunted form of osmosis - and yet it is apparent, at the least, that some pipes need more cleaning than others.

How is it in one country farmers are paid to avoid producing yet in other countries farmers cannot produce at all? How is it that in some countries HIV medications costs are covered but in other countries HIV medications cannot even be had without an ongoing battle with WIPO?

Is there, perhaps, something wrong? And if there is something wrong, do we truly expect more of the same to fix it?

The answer is not socialism or anything of it's ilk. And the answer most assuredly is not capitalism - the answer lays somewhere in between, where we do not pay lip service to our fellow human beings but also reward those that should be rewarded. And government, most assuredly, must be representative of the person on the street - which is almost assuredly not the case. Do all Iranians hate the United States? Do all Americans hate Muslims? Do all Muslims hate Christians? Do all Chinese think Tibet is a breakfast cereal to be consumed at whim? Do all indigenous people want to be developed in the same Western way that most of the world was forced to under European and then American influence?

Certainly, someone needs to talk to the American people. But while they are at it, they should also talk to the rest of the world. And to do that, there is a need for an emphasis on leadership instead of politics. You should not send a wolf to guard the sheep pen and then get upset with the wolf for it's woolen throated nature. In much the same way, one should not become upset with a politician for following their own nature. Leaders, however - true leaders - are few and far between on government levels. And yet we see leaders every day. What of that?

In a world where geopolitics divides, communication should connect. Invariably, it does not - and because of the nature of present media systems as well as political bias, it will not.

The Internet, they say, routes around everything. For 20.3% of the world so far, anyway.

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