Reflections on a Connected World

 As I take a quick look around I can see how our world today is increasingly connected. With a quick glance around my person I see many products designed or in one country and/ or manufactured elsewhere. My iPhone was designed by Apple in California and manufactured in China. My lunch today featured a banana, a tropical fruit that without established lines of growing and shipping, would be impossible to have in Utah. The clothes I'm wearing were designed by a Spanish company and made in Malaysia. It's amazing how far these products have travelled!

Now with Facebook pulled up I can see a feature of globalization outside of just products. Having served a mission in Poland, I have many friends and associates there. With the aid of technology, I can keep in personal touch with them and they can see what I'm up to. With the internet I can keep a current knowledge of current events in Poland and elsewhere that interest me. Simply by a few swipes of a touchscreen I can access thousands of articles and get access to the most recent news, any of which could be anywhere in the world at any time.

In Poland, I saw that even when I was thousands of miles away with an ocean separating me from the rest of the world, I still had a good idea of what was going on in America through my hometown and news gathered from conversations with people.  As I interacted with the Polish people, they asked repeatedly about American politics, and while I couldn't share my opinions or engage in deep political conversations, I constantly became more aware of how interconnected the world truly is and that they cared about what was going on in America because of the ramifications that changes there meant for their country. This was further reinforced as I walked the streets and saw McDonald's and other american businesses and was able to see what seemed like monuments of the interconnected world that we live in. Our world is truly interconnected.