All politics is local

I have recently been startled to notice how much one person can affect their entire society. For instance, last December I visited my brother in Paris. I hated Paris. It was not only the fact that until one gets about six stories up (say on the escalators of the Centre Pompadou) almost the entire city looks exactly the same; five story gray buildings covered in friezes filling the entire block, with architecture that seems designed primarily to intimidate rather than to sublimate. Granted the Latin Quarter is colorful, and Sacre Coeur is pretty breathtaking, but overall, I find it unspectacular. What I really hated was the horrible, resentful way people treat one another there, as if they were merely obstacles to each others' contentment. I had a conversation about it with a Belgian girl outside my brother's school's library. Her boyfriend was French and she couldn't understand why I laughed when she said she loved French men because they were so passionate. I explained to her that I thought the French were so passionate because they were constantly at odds with one another.

"What's so wrong with that?" she asked, "the whole world is full of conflict."

I laughed again and explained that the problem with Europe, and with much of America too is that in Democracy people are supposed to understand that their self-interest is best served by acting in the interest of everyone.

"Oh Democracy," she laughed scornfully, in exactly the attitude I think so many Americans have found to be the most infuriating thing about France in the last two decades, "Americans are always talking about Democracy." She would have gone on, but I interrupted.

"Uh, yeah," I said, in a tone I also use with a petulant child, "What the hell is wrong with you Europeans? I mean, YOU invented Democracy, not us. You sort of let us show you how to set it up, copied it roughly, and you basically haven't thought of it since."

She didn't answer. I knew I'd gotten through to her, but I didn't want her to get resentful again, so I changed the subject. There's an old axiom that there is nothing that makes a person feel humiliated more than being caught in a moment learning.

Every day after that evening, for the rest of that week, and especially when I came back from a quick tour of Geneva and Milan, that thing that had become so quintessentially French became ever so slightly less pronounced, like a cake of dried mud on the bottom of your shoe that gets loosened little by little as you slap the sole against the driveway.

Now, I would never dream of implying that I think I have so much influence over the world that I changed all of Paris with one conversation, or with a few conversations that I had beside that one. I can’t imagine I was the only American in Paris just then who felt frustrated at the bitterness directed at all Americans when it was mainly caused by George Bush’s idiocy. But I know I affected that girl’s attitude, and her attitude affects many other peoples’ attitudes. Everyone has an exponential effect on the rest of the world, and if each of those thirty Americans had one moment like mine, one conversation where they really hit on the thing that was bothering them, the ripple effect was really, really noticeable across the city.