With all this talk of Trump taking Greenland, people have commented on how the size of Greenland on the globe looks different than the flat map representation. It’s only a fifth of the size of the US instead of this massive thing. I pulled out our handy-dandy globe we purchased while homeschooling during Covid-19 and started having a look around. 

Of course, I looked for my home state of Oregon. I was surprised and delighted to see the municipal of Burns marked. If you’ve never been to Burns, it is out in the southeast quadrant of the state that is very sparsely populated. Named for the poet Robert Burns, it’s a wee town where we once ate dinner on Saturday night at the one restaurant. At the end of the meal, we stood up with all of the patrons and we all crossed the street together to the one theater and watched the once weekly showing of the only movie playing in town. 

Oregon is pretty big and yet not as historically significant as Israel, a country that is one-twelfth the size, about as big as the Willamette Valley where I grew up. Three religions and centuries of drama comes from such a tiny space. 

Oregon isn’t even the biggest or the emptiest state. Wyoming is a similar size with even fewer people than the city of Portland in the whole place. America has so much land and yet our federal government is eager to acquire Greenland at the consternation of its residents and most of Western Europe. Do we even need it? Can’t we just focus on making the best of what we already have? What is the point?