Now that the Salt Lake Olympic scandal seems to be settling down it may be appropriate to point out that in less than three short years Utah and Salt Lake City will be involved in welcoming the world right here in our neighborhood.

So, what is that world in a nutshell? Someone from the League of Women Voters has created a truncated description of our world today. If we could shrink the population of the Earth to a village of precisely 100 people, with all of the human ratios remaining the same it would look like this: There would be 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 Western Hemisphere people (both North and South America), and 8 Africans. Seventy persons would be non-Christian and 30 would be Christian. Fifty percent of the entire world's wealth would be in the hands of only six people, and these six would all be citizens of the United States. Seventy people would be unable to read. Fifty would suffer from malnutrition. Only one would have a university education.

When one considers our world from such an incredibly compressed perspective, the need for both tolerance and understanding becomes glaringly apparent.

-- David Blackbird
published in the Salt Lake Tribune on March 3, 1999