Speak Out

Maps don't reflect people's lives

In Deborah Taylor Hollis' March 24 opinion piece she states that "it may seem like a petty, small-minded demand" to seek a UN resolution to prevent countries from changing names so that map-collectors like herself don't have to fork out the dough to update their libraries.

Hey, if Ms. Hollis is asking the UN to make our pampered Western lives a little easier, could she add to her wish list the total elimination of those "nations with strange, native, hard-to-spell names"? Places such as Kosovo, Bosnia and Rwanda weren't on the maps of my childhood, so what reason is there for my children to learn about these ever-changing, foreign-sounding locales? Only if I want them to learn about the world they live in, peoples' fight for freedom and the fact that change is a natural, inevitable part of life.

I'm proud to own the same dog-eared Goode's atlas I bought for my college geography class 15 years ago. My favorite and only globe is a pre-WWII gem that I nabbed at a garage sale. Newspapers and CNN provide my updates on the world's changing names and boundaries. Maybe if people were less concerned with the accuracy of maps (the reason North African countries have perfectly angled borders) and more with caring of the humans living within those geographies, peace wouldn't be such a foreign-sounding word to the peoples whose countries and lives are in a constant state of change.

Lydia Lyons
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