Tonight we say goodbye to 2010 and also to the decade, depending upon how you count it. A couple of days after Christmas my husband and I went to Disneyland because I wanted to see Small World decorated for the holidays. I didn’t realize that quite by accident, I may have stumbled upon the theme of our next decade. Perhaps of our last decade, also. Now, more than ever, it’s a small world.
Mention the Disney ride It’s a Small World, and people will go ballistic on you, saying I hate that ride. I’ll never go on that ride again. I can’t stop singing that song afterwards. Drives me crazy. I say ok, the melody can be annoying, but there could be worse songs to have stuck in your head. Here are the lyrics:
it’s a world of laughter, a world or tears
its a world of hopes, its a world of fear
theres so much that we share
that its time we’re aware
its a small world after all
CHORUS:
its a small world after all
its a small world after all
its a small world after all
its a small, small world
There is just one moon and one golden sun
And a smile means friendship to everyone.
Though the mountains divide
And the oceans are wide
It’s a small small world.
There’s so much that we share. One moon, one sun for everyone. Smiles are universal. Get with the program and understand that we’re truly all in it together in our small interconnected world.
Having those lyrics heard round the world and resonating in your head could be pretty positive if people would stop and internalize the message because we don’t need peace on earth, goodwill to men only during the holidays. By internalize I mean stop a moment and look at the person in the car next to you, in line next to you, standing on the street corner or passed out in the gutter, over the border, over your back fence, cutting in line, waiting in the emergency room. You don’t have to like that person, approve of that person, or believe in the same things, but you do need to remember that that person was brand new once, a baby who cried, ate, pooped, crawled, smiled – babies all over the world did the same things. Every one of those babies had at least one person who loved him or her, and wished for a better life for their child, whether in America or France or Iran or China or in any other country. And now those babies are all those other people who started with the same aspirations. Some are advocating hatred, killing and committing crimes, behaving like bad people, but the vast majority are going about their daily business just trying to get by, or maybe make the world a better place.
Sometimes I think peace could be achieved in the Middle East if we just put everyone in the same room and waiting until they started to talk and find out the other person wasn’t so very different in what they wanted after all.
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Back in the early 1960s, Walt Disney – a visionary if ever there was one – put the stamp of arrpoval on developing this ride, this message. It was debuted at the 1964 New York World’s Fair and moved to Disneyland in 1966, the year Walt Disney died. Disney always looked to the future and his message here, camouflaged in the guise of happy little dolls, cannot be improved upon.
So we found ourselves at It’s a Small World, got in the boat, and there was that song. Wait, no, we were hearing Christmas songs and the entire ride was decorated for Christmas (which is why I wanted to see it – I love spectacle.) I took pictures which I’ll share, even the ones that aren’t crisp and clear because we were, after all, in a moving boat full of people. The ride was worth the trip. We loved it. The next photo I am thinking of as the winds of change.
