My 12-year-old son came to my wife and me with an odd problem to deal
with yesterday. He needed help figuring out how to solve a challenge
on his Xbox Live. Not how to beat a level or get an upgrade. No, the
problem was he and his online friends were trying to coordinate a
two-hour session of Halo 3 as a team but we're in Virginia, one guy
was in Kansas and the other guy was in....Singapore.  What's a common time for them?

If you ever wondered if this newest generation has a larger worldview
than many of us did as children you need only look to that
conversation. I am pretty sure that at 12 I wasn't worried about
coordinating entertainment events across multiple time zones but this
is a world he is comfortable with like its an everyday issue.

If you listen to his games the discussions are startling in their
banality as they talk about the differences in their schools while
defending against a tide of Flood or laugh about each others accents
while coordinating the take down of a rampaging squad of "angry
Brutes". He is learning tips and techniques regularly from a kid in
Spain.

I grew up in a small suburb of St. Louis, Missouri in the 70's and
80's. The idea of Singapore was an exotic far away place and I don't
remember meeting any kids of Asian descent even until reaching middle
school. Yet my children are spending their time developing a
substantially larger world view via a trivial video game.

Imagine what kind of business men and women or diplomats they will
make some day as they tackle a world that seems much smaller than the
one I imagined as a child. The comfort they have with global
conference calls and multi-cultural challenges can't help but make it
that much easier when it comes to tackle larger issues.

I know a lot of my parent friends are freaked out by all the time
their kids spend playing video games and the scary strangers they meet
online. We don't share that fear. We are raising good kids and we
monitor what they are doing closely and all I am seeing is a set of
kids who move in a world I could only dream of at their age. I never
thought a simple thing like Xbox Live would link my kids to such a
larger world.

Of course, there are some dangers. When I was in Iraq the second time
my wife wrote me to tell me about a stunning phone bill we had
received. As it turned out our then 14-year-old son had made friends
with a kid in Canada on Xbox Live. They were coordinating their games
via text messages. His world view didn't realize that Canada might be
a foreign country and international text messages were a lot more
expensive than domestic. Thank you to AT&T for getting rid of the
$700 bill for that one--with a laugh.

It led to a discussion of the fact that though Canada was just north
of us, it really is a different country. I busted on him pretty hard
about it at the time but its really kind of funny in the larger sense.

A world without borders seems like a ridiculous idea politically to
most of us but in a cultural sense I think the next generation's are
halfway there already.

I certainly understand it. I mean, hey, we have to unite against the
Covenant. That's just obvious.