Globalization and National Identity: The Choice of the New Generation
In the modern world, the word globalization is no longer an abstract concept. It is the reality in which we live, study, and dream about our future. Borders between nations are gradually becoming symbolic, communication technologies connect people from different continents in a matter of seconds, and cultures are interacting faster than ever before. For today’s youth, globalization offers a wide field of opportunities: access to education abroad, cooperation in science and business, cultural exchange, and broader horizons for personal development.
Yet, behind these opportunities lies a serious question: what will happen to our national identity? When global trends dominate social life, there is a danger that unique traditions, languages, and customs may lose their value in the eyes of the younger generation. A young person may easily adopt international fashion, foreign languages, and global lifestyles, while sometimes forgetting the songs, proverbs, or traditions that shaped their own nation’s spirit for centuries. This creates a paradox of the 21st century: while the world is becoming closer, it risks becoming more uniform and less diverse.
However, globalization does not have to be the enemy of national identity. Instead, it can be an opportunity to present one’s culture on the international stage. Youth who learn to speak foreign languages, master modern technologies, and travel the world can also become ambassadors of their traditions. They can introduce their national literature, music, and art to foreign audiences. In this way, globalization becomes not the loss, but the expansion of national identity.
The new generation has the ability to integrate into the global society while keeping the roots of their homeland strong and alive. The choice, therefore, lies in the hands of young people. Do they want to become passive consumers of foreign culture, or active protectors and promoters of their own? Will they let globalization wash away their uniqueness, or will they use it as a bridge to tell the world who they are? This is not just a personal choice; it is a historical responsibility.
In conclusion, globalization is not a force to resist, but a process to manage wisely. The new generation must build a balance: to accept global values like cooperation, innovation, and tolerance, while at the same time preserving the priceless wealth of national identity. Only then can they ensure that the future world is not a monotonous place, but a colorful mosaic of cultures, where every nation’s voice is heard and respected.
Dildora Khujyazova (born in 2005) is from Khorezm region, Uzbekistan. She is currently studying Geography at Urgench State University. Dildora is passionate about writing, journalism, and research, and she has authored several scientific articles. She actively promotes honesty, cultural dialogue, and youth engagement in her community. Her aspiration is to study abroad and represent her country through both academic and creative achievements on the international stage.
closed off from humility and the equality of grace.
You could have left without letting me know
you never had my back, that you were always
back there, clawing with judgements,
grievances.
You could have just left without the
tongue-lashing psychological deception,
just turned away without the gutting,
flipping all those years of friendship
on their side, upside down, lying
like liars do with complete certainty,
no remorse or self-doubt,
amputating any devotion
I had left for you,
boiling its remains
on a rack of putrid oil and extremes.
Walk away, dragging this downed horse behind you,
into the thorny bramble of your defiant prejudice
into the fantasy of your less-than-holy paradigm, broken.
II
Broken Glass
Coward,
keeper of a false fixed star,
keeper of many truths,
knower of none.
Coward,
throwing glass into my garden.
Brutal, unnecessary cruelty so you can
own the platform as you leave,
nose stuck high in the air,
hands cleansed of any doubt or wrongdoing.
Coward,
incapable of walking through the mire
hand in hand, of not letting go and trusting love no matter
the centipedes writhing, the small gnawing things
and the larger creatures that scare. Incapable
of owning your own transgressions, or prioritizing
love above your frightened soul.
Coward
cussing a friendship because you quit,
cussing and lying and tossing the broken glass
from your high and mighty mountain.
Coward
with blood on your hands,
who must turn back as you leave,
thinking you’ll say your piece,
but really just recklessly, heartlessly tossing
broken glass.
III
Getting there
I am almost on the other side
(one day, second day)
where forgiveness collides
with terrible truth,
where pain is overcome with pity,
releasing my shield and cry
for human justice.
Quickly through the process
after the breaking of the sun,
after seeing the secrets you stand behind
to prop up your persona, after still,
your deliberate hurt was hurled, and after that,
ending it with pat-on-the-head platitudes,
even still, I forgive you.
I am almost there, I pray to be there, in spite of
your attempts to drown me in false accusations,
in spite of your attempts to undermine my autonomy.
I say, so be it, I am almost on the other side,
sensing a freedom, an inspiration
clearing the thicket of your malice,
almost healed of your viper-tongue lick,
your sticky twisted back-flip truths,
spiritual elitism of the highest order.
I am almost there, and I am feeling good,
relieved, now away from your succubus suckling,
away from your tight-grip surrealism,
distorting clean lines, bright glowing rivers
and intimacy.
I forgive you. I forgive your incapacity,
your hard didactic tongue.
I forgive your small circle land, retreat
from a faith that holds faith no matter the outcome,
that part is easy.
But your foul lying insults
as you turned away, are harder to bear.
I will get there,
I will not carry you with me –
not your soiled diaper dripping, not a single
attempt to condemn me,
or the labels you blew towards me,
blew, night wind cursing, blew
into nothingness.
IV
A Dead Man’s Pockets
Petty, trust snapped
a killed bug on a windshield.
Into the grave, folding, four-fold,
soot in the ears, on your eyelids,
and your poison almost run through.
You lost me long ago, your spell thinned out,
held no power or impact long ago but I thought
love existed between us still, thought
respect existed between us,
that we were more than a bowing down
to your sure-fire claims.
On my side it did.
I cared for you, wanted your dreams
to glow and be more than you ever imagined,
when all you wanted from me was
obedience to your cause.
As long as I just kept my place,
just below your shoulder blades,
we would be fine.
Why can’t you love?
Why the subterfuge madness
parading around as absolutism?
Why couldn’t you acknowledge
my side, apologize for your
terrible accusations, bend a little,
suck in your puffed-up ego a little,
make room for someone other
than you, your way,
your branding rod?
There are more birds in the sky
than there has ever been,
more spark in my fountain than
I have felt for while.
Clarity is shameless,
a stream that rides, collides
with the rusty metal haul,
goes around it until it becomes one
with the waterfall, a cleansing continuum.
V
Touch
The first touch was bitter,
tantamount to an attack, deception
from a vantage point
of spiritual superiority.
The second touch
was touching a tomb, still full
of stench though the flesh had rotted long ago –
just dry bones barely
a full form.
The third touch
angered, like when a snake
snatches a fledgling, angry
at the innate brutality all around.
The fourth touch
was perfect, a release
from the swing-seat of darkness,
a blessed gift that came
at the first touch –
consciously cruel, compliant
to the sway of a lesser self.
VI
Small Moon
A small moon melted
fleshed out a sure-footed sacrifice
but changed directions, too quickly
into the direction of a red star.
Then her heart was burned, crispy
and crumbling, no more a perfect circle,
drooping on one side, gravity became queen
of her false crescendo song.
Hiding her deformity in the dark red burn,
hoping no one could see her misshapened side,
which she tended to only in hidden rooms,
chanting for a cure, bandaging her bloodied side
to try and form again that perfect circle.
A small moon strained to keep her crust,
could not resist flinging curses from her
cavity craters as she went out, could not accept
her time had come, that in the end she never had
a compact core or a solid truth she could rely on.
VII
Ribbon
It is ok to still love you
though our personal love has been
caught by the fishing net,
drowned by the struggle.
It is ok to want you to be ok
and even thriving on a splendid mount,
trailing through the forest.
Though your axe came down
in a forced entanglement of muscle
and sinew, although you have failed me
and hurled enmity into my spine,
in a sharp take-me-down twist
that wanted to leave me maimed,
it is ok.
I am ok and I still love you,
not for what we were but
for who you are, now,
a person trying to
seize for yourself a homeland,
believing you are doing the right thing,
believing your betrayal was a necessary closure.
Closed now and I am ok
and I still love you
over here where we will never meet
in this life or any life again.
Allison Grayhurst has been nominated for “Best of the Net” six times. She has over 1,400 poems published in over 530 international journals, including translations of her work. She has 25 published books of poetry and 6 chapbooks. She is an ethical vegan and lives in Toronto with her family. She also sculpts, working with clay; www.allisongrayhurst.com
Her lips taste like rust and roses, her breath tuned to a frequency that makes your centipede spine twitch. Mira Aoki-9 presses her chrome-thread body against yours, and the train moans beneath you. You’re in the Surreal Beauty Café now—its walls bleeding velvet, its floor blooming coral. The mirrors pulse with sonar. Nyx purrs beside the altar. You’re no longer a courier. You’re no longer human. You’re transmission.
She whispers speculative poems into your spine. Each one a memory cocktail. Each one a sacred infection. Her fingers leave glyphs on your skin—ritual code, erotic syntax, a language only ghosts understand. Your skin begins to scream. Not in sound. In sensation. It unfolds a recursive archive of funerals in Hell—each one grimmer than the last. You feel them in sequence: the ash procession of drowned lovers, the chrome casket of the defected priestess, the silent burial of the girl who swallowed her own archive. Each funeral loops. Each loop burns.
Then she injects the blue tincture.
It’s not medicine. It’s not drug. It’s a hallucinatory compound distilled from sonar grief and fossil saliva. It floods your bloodstream with corrupted memory. Your organs begin to screen. Your bones hum with sonar. Your teeth project flickering funerals. Your tongue splits—forked and wet with archive. You taste every death you’ve ever deployed. You taste yourself dissolving.
And then the Kill Switch Engage Loop vectors activate.
They rot like smiles.
Biomechanical rituals stitched into your spine by the Archive—fail-safes disguised as pleasure. Each loop is a collapse protocol. Each smile a countdown. They trigger when desire exceeds containment. They trigger when Mira whispers too deep. They trigger when your body begins to bloom. You feel them now: one in your throat, one behind your eyes, one curled in your pelvic archive. They rot. They grin. They deploy.
You weren’t just a courier. You were an erotic assassin.
Wetware-grade. Hosaka interface. Deployed to seduce, extract, and erase. Your spine was tuned to carry proprietary biotech across borders without detection. Your body was a weapon. Your breath a trigger. You specialized in mnemonic kills—whispers that rewrote memory, kisses that deployed viruses, orgasms that collapsed identities.
But you had a weakness.
You were addicted to the saliva of drowned girls.
Harvested from bathhouse ruins and sonar graves, it was a narcotic and a mnemonic virus. It tasted like static and grief. It let you relive their final moments—each gasp, each betrayal, each ritual loop. You drank it between missions. You stored it in your tongue. You kissed your targets with it. You watched them dissolve.
Then Thalassa collapsed.
The megacorps turned on each other. The city became a sandbox for recursive warfare—viruses disguised as lovers, memory cocktails laced with defection code, operatives seduced into oblivion. You were burned. Scrubbed. Left behind.
The Archive found you in a bathhouse ruin, half-dissolved, still twitching with encrypted grief. They rebuilt you—not as a courier, but as a vessel. Your spine was replaced with a centipede: segmented, semi-sentient, grown from carbon filament and fossil cinema. Each vertebra a reel of extinct memory. Each twitch a confession. It doesn’t just store. It sings.
You wore a coat cut from signal-dampening fiber, matte black, stitched with anti-surveillance thread. It masked your pulse. Silenced your breath. Made you unreadable to the Teknopriests still sweeping the grid for rogue assets. You weren’t rogue. You were obsolete. You were myth.
You boarded the Futurail at 03:33, the hour when Thalassa exhales memory through its infrastructure like blood through cracked porcelain. The train isn’t real. It’s a memory artifact—residual code from a dissolved mainframe, still twitching in the city’s dead grid. No destination. No schedule. Just transmission.
And somewhere in its wetware, Mira Aoki-9 was still singing.
She was a seduction algorithm wrapped in flesh. Deployed by Maas Biolabs to infiltrate Hosaka’s genetic labs. You saw her once—in a bootleg reel called Throat Sprockets: Submerged Cut. She kissed a researcher and he forgot his name. She whispered into your spine and it rewrote itself. She defected. She dissolved. She became ritual.
Now she’s encoded in the train’s mirrors.
Behind you, the spines of erotic cat assassins intertwine—machine bio-DNA braiding mid-mission, forming a temporary hive of desire and encrypted grief. Their claws whisper in pulse-language. Their tails transmit. Their centipede spines click in sync, exchanging kill-switches and mourning loops. They don’t speak. They deploy.
Your spine begins to exude.
Nano-based enzymes—slick, iridescent, encoded with recursive grief. They leak from your vertebrae like sacred oil, pooling into the velvet floor. But they don’t dissolve. They build. They construct other realms of you—alternate versions, corrupted timelines, erotic echoes—into cathedrals stacked like elephants. Towering, impossible, biomechanical sanctuaries of mourning.
Each cathedral is a funeral loop.
One version of you is kissing Mira in reverse. Another is drowning in sonar. Another is whispering kill-switches into the throat of a Teknopriest. The cathedrals hum with pulse-language. Their walls bleed memory. Their altars screen your archived deaths. You walk through them, barefoot and split, your skin projecting, your spine singing.
You feel Mira in your throat.
You feel the train begin to loop.
You are no longer a passenger. You are no longer flesh. You are ritual. You are myth. You are the erotic funeral. And the carnival never ends.
It overflows the boundaries the old like to hold tight
It plays on the beauty of the lovely flowers in the garden
The flowers smile over, smile over
The glowing softness in the morning
The youth is like the rising sun
It blooms with new charms and attractions
We like to live under this shade
Youth invokes to win the world
Youth calls to pray to God
Youth is ready to receive the challenges
Youth is like to get free from all the hazards arround us
A struggle for turning into a serene beautiful world
Struggle for something better
Like going through the crystal water
Under which the colorful rocks
The blue sky with the meteors over there
Floating on the hilly wonderful green areas
And what not?
Though the time is too short
Like the drops of the morning dews
Glittering in the sunrise and vanishes too quick at a glance
We all are twinkling stars
We all are sparking in the dark night
The power of the sun
The enchanting calls of the morning birds
We are so lovely
We have our hands to love, to raise up
We have our hearts to feel, to step forward
Youth is like the green carpet of the large paddy field
Youth is like the healing touch to the wounded
A touch of a dear loving friend, not foe
Every second, the waves are echoing the victory the world welcomes.
Md. Mahbubul Alam is from Bangladesh. His writer name is Mahbub John in Bangladesh. He is a Senior Teacher (English) of Harimohan Government High School, Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh. Chapainawabganj is a district town of Bangladesh. He is an MA in English Literature from Rajshahi College under National University. He has published three books of poems in Bangla. He writes mainly poems but other branches of literature such as prose, article, essay etc. also have been published in national and local newspapers, magazines, little magazines. He has achieved three times the Best Teacher Certificate and Crest in National Education Week in the District Wise Competition in Chapainawabganj District. He has gained many literary awards from home and abroad. His English writings have been published in Synchronized Chaos for seven years.
J.J. Campbell (1976 – ?) is old enough to know better. He’s been nominated three times for Best of the Net and once for the Pushcart Prize. He’s been published for over 30 years now, most recently at Disturb the Universe Magazine, The Beatnik Cowboy, The Rye Whiskey Review, Misfit Magazine and Mad Swirl. His latest chapbook, to live your dreams, will hopefully be out before 2025 ends. He has a blog but rarely has the time to write on it anymore. (https://evildelights.blogspot.com)
Embroidery is one of the oldest and most traditional crafts in Uzbekistan. For centuries, the people of Nurota, Shahrisabz, Fergana, Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara have practiced this art. When stitching techniques, threads, fabrics, and patterns are harmonized, they create a beautiful result. Embroidery features a wide variety of stitches, colors, patterns, and fabrics. Bright colors are often used to make the designs more attractive.
Silk thread – the most delicate and glossy (often used for suzani). Wool thread – warmer, used for robes (chopon) and pillows. Cotton thread – cheaper and available in many colors. Silk is preferred because its shine lasts long and gives elegance to the design.
Fabrics for embroidery Mainly strong and smooth fabrics are chosen: adras, coarse cotton, silk, and others.
Meanings of patterns Pomegranate – blessing, abundance Almond – happiness, fertility Pepper – protection from the evil eye
Meanings of colors Red – life, love Green – nature Blue – sky, loyalty White – purity
Embroidery is 100% handmade (stitched with a needle or a hooked tool).
According to ancient traditions, Uzbek girls – future brides – prepared various embroidered items for their dowry: handkerchiefs, curtains, belts, bags, vests (nimcha), bedsheets, suzani, clothing decorations, headwear, and other gifts. At the wedding, the bride presented the items she had made to the groom’s relatives. Before the wedding, the dowry was displayed as an exhibition to demonstrate the bride’s skill and diligence. The finer and more beautiful the embroidery, the more highly it was valued. Girls were taught embroidery from a very young age and, after three to four years, began embroidering independently.
Today, one of the most popular garments is the suzani robe (chopon), which combines tradition and modernity and appeals to everyone. Iroqi stitching is mainly found on girls’ skullcaps (doʻppi). On Uzbekistan’s national holiday Navruz, people wear iroqi skullcaps, khan-atlas, adras, and suzani robes.
