Shared values, not shared enemies

I was 15 years old in the mid-1990s. Turkey's Aegean port city of İzmir had started becoming too small for me. I was dreaming about going away to cities foreign to me. I had many different lives in my mind; my dreams could have filled a notebook. And this country was in none of them.

I was a teenager and I was extremely under the influence of American youth culture. I was surprised at Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley's marriage. While my tears shed for Freddy Mercury had not even dried, I mourned for Kurt Cobain. As if I knew life very well, I was repeating the quote from Forrest Gump, "Life is like a box of chocolates."

Amid idealism on the borderline of whimsicality and amid optimism on the borderline of stupidity, one day an essay question and I were looking at each other: "Can there be only one world civilization?" Even though the concept of globalization was introduced as of the 1980s, I did not know what it was and what it was not at that time. I had answered this essay question with a childish naivety.

"Of course there could be. It would be awesome." I fictionalized a just and free world where borders, weapons and states did not exist, where everybody lived wherever they liked and spoke any language they wanted. I had never thought that globalization would standardize the world and its biggest advantage would be to come across a MacDonald's, IKEA or Zara everywhere. 

A long time passed… I went abroad and then came back to my country, where I started travelling around; then my identity developed. 

The Aegean was my home anyway. While I travelled through the Black Sea, eastern and southeastern provinces of Rize, Van, Hatay, Gaziantep, Diyarbakır, Kars, Mardin, Sinop, Giresun, Artvin and the Central Anatolian...