By: Kevin Beardmore, Ed.D.

My wife and I have four children. When they were young, our home was a veritable hive of activity, but the buzzing was rarely a quiet hum. This presented a problem.

We could not understand what was being said on TV.

This led to using closed captioning all the time. While our kids are grown now, it is still how we watch television at my house.

This made it easier to watch international shows after we finally decided to get Netflix. Reading subtitles was already the norm. Suddenly what seemed to be an endless menu of possibilities was open to us. Korean rom-coms, Egyptian action, Chinese dramas. We have watched a myriad of offerings. Months into doing this, I had a realization that was similar to one I had nearly four decades ago.

I was rooming with a German student while taking summer classes at college. His English was excellent and he didn’t look out of place on an American campus in any particular way. But his toothpaste was clearly from Germany. Even at a glance, no one would mistake the tube for something purchased in the United States.

The toothpaste, however, looked like ordinary toothpaste. The label, language, and brand were all German. But what you found inside was basically the same.

Watching international shows made me think the same thing. Whether it is a LeBron James poster on a dorm room wall in China or phones, appliances, and vehicles that would look right at home in Eddy County, the similarities are astonishing. Around the globe, many lives are more the same than they are different.

The comedy, the action, and the drama are very familiar. They seem to be common to humanity. Many academics have studied this. Anthropologist Donald E. Brown, in his book Human Universals, identified societal features such as baby talk, customary greetings, a preference for one’s own children and kin, sanctions for crimes against one’s social group, and repetition and pauses in poetry that one finds across the world.

Beyond the settings, the storylines in each series remind me of another set of universals. American philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum identified ten fundamentally human opportunities for a life of dignity, which range from being able to live a healthy life of normal length, to have the freedom to think, reason, and imagine as an individual, and to affiliate with others. She included the capability to play, to feel emotion, and to control one’s environment through actions such as the right to own property and political participation. Whether plot or subplot, almost all contain one of these elements.

This doesn’t mean that we are all the same. The cultures we are raised within influence our preferences in many ways. One quite obvious one is what we eat. On Thursday, April 10 from 5:00-7:00 pm, Southeast New Mexico College will once again host “Taste of Culture,” a free public event where you can sample culinary delights from all around the world. It is like eating at more than a dozen restaurants in one evening with no bill to pay! I hope you will join us to celebrate a wide variety of flavors along with more than 600 of your friends and neighbors.

It is an opportunity to remember again that while we are different in many ways, we are “one world, one people.” That is Carlsbad Rotary’s theme this year—as well as a timeless remembrance of our shared humanity.

Kevin Beardmore, Ed.D., is the President of Southeast New Mexico College. He may be reached at kbeardmore@senmc.edu or 575.234.9211