You can identify change in the world by reading lengthy polemics, or by examining complex data, or by attending scientific forums. You can also do it, informally, most of the time, by simply looking at what’s going on around you. Long before the data comes in to tell us about a change in the world, we can come to grips with the shifts, or the differences, by simply being in an observational mood.
Sometimes, the awareness comes from a moment. Last week, I’m watching a women’s soccer match between the national teams of Germany and France. It’s fairly long-range action so the players are indistinct, but in the close-ups of the team members I notice a striking thing: there are black athletes in both the German and the French teams. In that brief moment, from a totally unexpected source, you see right before you incontrovertible evidence of the astonishing change in racial distribution, and indeed acceptance, that we now have on the planet. Just a few decades ago, those two teams would have been lily-white. Now almost every team, male or female, has one or two, or more, black players. You don’t have to spend time looking up any data, or consult any scientific treatise to see the change; just go to an international soccer match or a track-and-field event; it’s out there on the field. You can take a picture of it and email it to your friends; sudden but unerring evidence of significant social change.
Consider the Guyana economy: If you visited Guyana in the 1970s and 1980s, you didn’t have to spend any time doing any research to know that it was going through a very lean period. You only had to cast your eyes on the long, empty shelves in the supermarkets (I took a photograph of one to show to my GT friends in Toronto), or the long lines at
