LETTERS FROM HOME: RESPONDING TO THE BEAT, BEAT, BEAT OF THE E-MAIL

March 29, 2001

Dear Leslie,

E-mail is the tribal drum of the 21st century, instantaneously bouncing messages around the globe. Hours after someone has thought of something to say, many thousands of people have read it and passed it on.

Of course, some of those messages deserve to be bounced and some don't.

My friend Gail routinely sends along jokes, stories, anonymous wisdom and requests to participate in chain letters meant to raise money to treat a child dying of cancer somewhere. My friend Julie tends toward urgent requests to write a congressman to prevent the despoilers from wrecking the environment anew.

In reality, though, most of the people alive today aren't plugged in to this tribal communications system. One in 100 of the people on earth has access to a computer.

But attempts are being made to wire more of the world. The Peace Corps is recruiting in Silicon Valley, trying to hire on laid off dot-com workers willing to spread their computer knowledge to the recesses of the earth. For better or worse, one day we'll all be plugged in.

The following message was e-mailed to me by someone I hardly know. She thought I might be interested. Rather, I was amazed. It was a reminder of how ethnocentric we can be and how fortunate most of us are.

If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, there would be:

57 Asians

21 Europeans

14 from the Western Hemisphere, both north and south

8 Africans

52 would be female

48 would be male

70 would be non-white

30 would be white

70 would be non-Christian

30 would be Christian

89 would be heterosexual

11 would be homosexual

6 people would possess 59 percent of the entire world's wealth and all 6 would be from the United States.

80 would live in substandard housing

70 would be unable to read

50 would suffer from malnutrition

1 would be near death; 1 would be near birth

1 would have a college education

1 would own a computer

When one considers our world from such a compressed perspective, the need for acceptance, understanding and education becomes glaringly apparent.

The following is also something to ponder:

If you woke up this morning with more health than illness, you are more blessed than the million who will not survive this week.

If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pangs of starvation, you are ahead of 500 million people in the world.

If you can attend a church meeting without fear of harassment, arrest, torture, or death, you are more blessed than three billion people in the world.

If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep, you are richer than 75 percent of this world.

If you have money in the bank, in your wallet and spare change in a dish someplace, you are among the top 8 percent of the world's wealthy.

If your parents are still alive and still married you are very rare, even in the United States and Canada.

If you can read this message, you just received a double blessing in that someone was thinking of you, and furthermore, you are more blessed than over two billion people in the world that cannot read at all.

The e-mail concluded:

Work like you don't need the money.

Love like you've never been hurt.

Dance like nobody's watching.

Sing like nobody's listening.

Live like it's Heaven on Earth.

Pass it on.

Love, Sam