Learn a foreign language

Barack Obama is absolutely right to demand of his fellow citizens to learn a foreign language. But I he is not necessarily right for the reasons he mentioned. Very few Americans need to speak a second language for their trip to Europe. From this point of argumentation his point was somewhat elitist.
The reason that it is very useful in our modern world to speak at least one other language is that the world become much smaller with the rise of the Internet. While Germany was thousands of kilometers away just 2 decades ago, now almost every part of the world is just one mouse-click away. While you needed to board a plan and travel for several hours to get involved with a different language and a different culture you nowadays just need to switch on your computer and visit the chatrooms of other nations. For the same price you pay for talking to people from your nation.

I see the Internet as the great opportunity of the 21th century. While in the decades that lay behind us the public forum was limited to the local districts and by national media in some way to the nation as itself, the public forum will become global by the rise of the Internet.
If the people of over the world will be able to talk to each other, ideas will start to cross borders in a pace they never did before. And that is a good thing. As long as we are talking we won't fight. My biggest hope that I place into the Internet is that it will crush the prejudices by which we perceived other nations for centuries. And there are deep differences between the differences that are around within the different language communities. The German speaking nations have a prevalent set of ideas that is distinct from the ideas in the French speaking nations, which are again different from the ideas in the English speaking nations.
There is this illusion of being international in the English speaking world, caused by the fact that so many people in so many nations speak English. You know your nation, Canada, Australia, Great Britain and so on and see that all those western nations are all that similar in culture and nationally prevalent ideas. What is then commonly done is that this experience from the English speaking world is extrapolated to other modern non-English-speaking nations in Europe or Asia.
By the difference of language the flow of ideas is interrupted. There might be an idea that catches within the English speaking community that never catches within the French speaking community simply because it never got translated. On the other hand: The might be other ideas prevalent within the French speaking community that a not common within the English speaking one. Ideas that might impede the rise of ideas that were translated into French.
Getting to know a different language community is something that is personally very beneficial, but also something that might be necessary in the world to come.

As it stands now ideas flow better from Europe to America than vice versa - why? Because Europeans can engage into political debates in America. How many Americans could engage by writing a foreign language blog in the political/social debates in France or Russia?

I can engage into a political debate with English speaking people. When I do it, then in the hope to get humanist and social-democratic ideas to flow over the Atlantic into the American debate. When it comes to translating the ideas of the Evangelical Right back into German than I can just say: Ich werden den Teufel tun, evangelikal-konservativ politische Ideen ins Deutsche zu übersetzen.
I simply won't harm my own political aims by helping opposed ideas to catch in Germany and I guess you never expected that. If you would want your ideas to catch over here, you would have to do the work of translating them and arguing for them in a foreign language yourself.