Pico Iyer

Because electing Harris matters to the global neighborhood

Every day our markets, our viruses—that new family down the street—remind us that we’re living in a global neighborhood. Someone sneezes in Wuhan and the effects are felt in Billings. Stocks tremble on Wall Street and panic spreads across Lagos and Mumbai. It’s hard to forget that the welfare of any one of us depends on the well-being of everyone else.

Yet even as our world grows ever more global, we continue to turn ever more provincial. Our news focuses obsessively on the local, the domestic. We devote our days to transmitting pictures of our latest ramen feast across the universe. Who cares if children are living on a garbage heap in Manila or women are getting raped by cartels in Guayaquil when Kim sent out that photo of St. Barts six minutes ago? Wherever I travel, from Bangkok to Buenos Aires, people ask me how the richest nation in the world can be the one least interested in the rest of the world.

When Barack Obama stepped onto the political stage, opportunity woke up. Here was someone who knew what it was to be Kenyan, to live in Indonesia, to come from Kansas, to grow up in Hawaii. America lost its most searching and subtlest travel writer when he disappeared into the White House. Now, at last, we have another leader who knows that the world does not end at El Paso and that someone from Jamaica or India should never be called an “other.”

This matters at a time when people in Iran or China often know far more about us than we know about them. Once a woman becomes president, the US will at last no longer be forty years behind India, Britain, and the Philippines. And after Kamala Harris takes office, there’s even a chance our country may join the rest of humanity, instead of drifting ever farther behind Germany, Japan, and France.

Of course there will be rejoicing across the land. But the greatest relief and hope will be felt among our 7.8 billion neighbors across the planet. They know that unless our country is at peace, none of theirs can be.

Pico Iyer is the author of seventeen books, most recently The Half Known Life and, coming very soon, Aflame.