Watching a program about kangaroos in Australia, they talk to a man from Japan and I think about how different the world is for them - Australia's relationship with Asia because of their proximity; how much they've mixed with Asian than the US has; how much more they know about Asian countries and peoples just because of that immigration and neighborhood. It occurred to me that someone could live their whole life in Japan or Australia and travel among those countries and never think about the U.S. at all or care about the people there or want to visit. Just as there are middle class Americans who will never leave the U.S. (or maybe even the Midwest or whatever section of the country they live in), there are their counterparts across the world who will never travel outside Australia or China or Japan or whatever country the live in. (For some reason my mind has a hard time saying that, thinking that people in those countries are more exploratory and mobile and interested in the wider world. I don't know if that's true and maybe it's because their countries are smaller or not as developed as ours is but it's just a feeling I have.)

This is one of those times when I wish I was rich and could travel to all those places or take other people there. Or had a job where I could go and talk to co-workers about it. Or had a social circle so I could go and talk to my friends about it. Or was a social leader so I could talk to large groups of people who might never have considered going outside the country and persuade them to do so, to think about all those people and to think about meeting them and get excited about it. These are the kinds of ways that I'd like to change the world.