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Making Your Reading ‘Global’ Is More Important Than Ever
Expand your horizons
In the span of just three weeks, President Donald Trump has floated the idea of the United States expanding to include such varied locales as Greenland, Panama, Canada, and Gaza. I’m not sure who’s more infuriated by this madness, the countries he seems hell-bent on making into U.S. states or Puerto Rico, which can’t seem to become state #51 no matter how much they actually want to. I’ve also found myself asking a question about his supporters who are on board with this saber-rattling, expansionist insanity like it’s 1898 rather than 2025.
Can they even find any of these countries on a map? Maybe Canada — maybe — but not Panama and certainly not Gaza. The way geography is taught in Texas schools today, most kids can’t find the Gulf of Mexico, even before Google Earth renamed it, and their parents are no more geographically literate. But let’s take it one step further than simply looking a map.
Does President Trump (or his acolytes) know anything about these countries he so desperately wants to control? I don’t mean dry facts and figures like population or Gross Domestic Product; I mean know anything about the people? Going beyond the MAGA bunch, how much do any of us know about the cultures beyond our own borders? Probably less than we know about our own, which is…
