One of my favorite writers is Pico Iyer. He is billed as a travel writer but he is *much* more. Here is a great interview with him...

Postmodern Tourism:
An Interview with Pico Iyer

A longtime essayist, and the author of four books, Iyer is one of the most eloquent and incisive observers of the new cultural mix that characterizes today's borderless world. His writing moves from travel reportage to social criticism to philosophical rumination, always with a keen eye for odd juxtapositions. Whether he is speaking German to a tipsy police chief i Cuba, eating enchiladas in Nepal, or reading a Jackie Collins novel at a public library in Bhutan, his world is one where the foreign and the familiar always coexist in unexpected ways.
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I think one of the startling things for somebody arriving at Los Angeles Airport today from Tibet, say, is that suddenly half the faces they see are Chinese -- exactly the people they have been trying to flee from. Also, everywhere they turn they see kimchi restaurants and mee krob and sushi, and they wonder, "What is this America that we've landed in? This is not the hamburger-and-french-fry-paradise that we imagined." So I think people's minds are going to have to assimilate in the sense that all the world is international now. The whole world has gone global. I think cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles are the models of our future.

As you suggested, it brings with it many perils, but it's also in our hands to enjoy all the possibilities that were completely denied our grandparents who, whether they wanted it or not, were in almost every case rooted in a very single culture.
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thanks to wood s lot