Growing up as an American with immigrant parents, awareness of the world and how large it is was ingrained in me from a very young age. Even as a child, I understood that all my extended family members are across the world in Croatia, Ukraine, Hungary, etc., unable to attend any Christmases or Thanksgivings with us.
Besides playing a game called "Geography Baseball" in fifth grade, I was never taught geography in school. I moved around to so many different schools both in Illinois and in Florida and never once in all my years of schooling was there a required geography class.
Instead, I learned geography at home. My dad would constantly quiz my sister and me, asking us to name capitals or point to countries on a map with a laser pointer.
Though my world geography knowledge isn't amazing by any means, I have kept up with learning a lot of it in my spare time and I do know a decent amount.
This is why it shocked me to learn that my friends and peers were completely clueless about the world. I know people who thought that Egypt was an island, Budapest was in Asia, and that Croatia was a third-world country.
People across the world tend to see the US as self-centered and somewhat clueless. And I hate that that stereotype is actually kind of true.
There are people in the US that live in their own bubbles for their whole lives. They grow up in the same town that generations of their family have lived in and never leave their home state. People from a different US region are foreign to them, let alone other countries.
Now there's nothing inherently wrong with this. I even longed for this sometimes when I was wishing my aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins could come to my high school graduation. I envied friends that had grandparents they could drive to.
But living in a bubble can also be destructive. If you don't bother to learn where others are in the world and how they live, you lose empathy for them.
Why should you care about someone on the other side of the planet?
Our world is becoming more and more interconnected with each passing day. I have had an internet argument with someone in Bangladesh. I've uploaded videos to YouTube that were viewed in the UK and Australia.
The internet allows us to communicate with strangers across the world. And like it or not, every communication with people across the globe will affect their opinion of Americans just as their communication with us affects our opinions of them.
And public opinion of certain countries can influence all kinds of things, such as how politicians/diplomats interact with them.
Learning something about countries and how they operate will also help with understanding politics, economics, and all sorts of topics people should be keeping up with.
It's mind-blowing to think about the fact that people are being born, growing up, and dying in places that we haven't even heard of and living lives we couldn't even begin to imagine ourselves.
Maybe knowing that Buenos Aires is the capital of Argentina doesn't seem like the most important thing, but knowing these things will help in the long run. They help to make you a more worldly and intelligent person while also helping to increase your empathy for people all around the world.
And empathy is something that the world really needs right now.
