Living in the Global Village

I watched a segment on CNN today where they stated that there are more Spanish than English radio stations in Oklahoma City.  They interviewed locals who saw this as an example of being cosmopolitan. I think that they have some distance to travel. When I was young, Toronto was called Hog town by those sophisticated folks in Montreal. I would travel in my youth to Montreal to meet my girlfriend who I had met in the Winston Churchill pub on Rue de la Montaigne near McGill University. She would wonder how I could live in such a place. I admit that it had a sort of dull English, Irish and Scots monoculture. Ernest Hemingway during his stint at the Toronto Star referred to the city as Belfast North. In order to buy a good pizza you had to drive to Buffalo, New York.

Today things have certainly changed! You can watch on television many local channels, a dedicated Chinese, two dedicated French, a Spanish/Italian, an Aboriginal, and a multicultural one where Russian, Polish and other languages are spoken. I went to my local library this morning after I watched CNN and took some pictures of the direction signs. There are not a few books but whole sections in a large variety of languages.