Globalization:

I cannot comprehend what life must've been like for my great-great-grandmother Caroline. She was born in 1854 -- one hundred years before me.

She was born before the light bulb was invented, before the refrigerator, typewriter, chewing gum, telephone, automobile, ballpoint pen, zipper, radio, tractor, washing machine, bra, parachute, stainless steel, antibiotics, and insulin. She died before nylon and the helicopter were invented. Heck, the laser, jet engine, birth-control pill, integrated circuit and the computer weren't invented until after I was born... not to mention, pocket calculators, and videocassette recorders. Within the past thirty years, the personal computer, email, the mobile phone, the artificial heart, the internet, the world-wide web, GPS (global positioning system), DNA fingerprinting and human genome sequencing have been invented. It boggles the mind.

Caroline probably only knew, or knew of, less than 100 people in her life. And I bet she traveled less than a fifty-mile radius from her home. I think she could read and write, but I'm sure her reading was limited to a few things like the Bible and Jane Austen's books.

Today everywhere I turned, there it was... in the newspaper, on television news reports and on the computer screen... hundreds of images of a place called Haiti.

I'm thinking I'd like to live in 1854.