Maps and Perspective

Last week was a tough week to be an American who values attributes like civility, honesty, and respect for other cultures. According to a reliable "witness," our President (a.k.a. racist-in-chief) referred to immigrants from Africa and Haiti as coming from sh#%hole countries. You could hear people around the world literally gasp. And then you could hear the apologists on Fox News declare that the President was just representing what the average Joe in a bar in Wisconsin would say. First, I think that many average Joe's in Wisconsin would probably cringe at that generalization, just like people around the world cringed at our President's generalization.  And second, I don't want an average Joe from Wisconsin as my president. I think the president should be smarter, better-educated, and more qualified than I am. He should be someone I look up to, not an object of disdain.

I wonder how much our President or the average Joe knows about Africa? I'm sure he's never visited. Does he have any idea how big it is, how many countries it contains, what languages the people speak?  I recently stumbled across this map in my internet wanderings. It's a great perspective on the vastness of Africa -- it can hold the United States, China, the Indian subcontinent and big chunks of Europe. I know from personal experience that the drive through the Serengeti, which is just one part of one African country (Tanzania), seems endless. Africa is immense and immensely diverse -- not to be dismissed with the wave of a hand or a thoughtless remark.

On the other hand, we know from experience in our US elections that size is not necessarily the most important measure of value and importance. People have struggled with many different ways to represent the relationship between population, geography, and electoral votes in the US states. This is the best one that I've seen. While it's true that both the US Senate and the electoral college are designed to make sure that rural America has a voice, this map demonstrates that their voice has become disproportionately loud. We live in an urban world. We live in a diverse world. And we need to find a way to better represent that in our political system. (By the way, you can find much more detail about this map and the ideas behind it here.) 

Maps like statistics can be useful or they can be misused. And they can also teach us that size isn't the only thing that matters.