Silenced Majority Portal: Travel As A Political Act

(This will be cross-posted tomorrow at Democracy Cell Project blog. Photos were taken by Slugbug in Istanbul and Paris. Original interview was by Mark Rahner of the Seattle Times.)

Rick Steves is a local travel guru who has a PBS series called "Europe Through the Backdoor." He started as a backpacker and advocates budget travel as a way to be "close to the ground" and meet real people, rather than travelling in a four-star bubble lacking in real local character. He also feels that we sometimes can better understand our own country and culture after leaving it. He shares examples of the value of travel broadening your perspective and how important in a post-9/11 world that is, especially when we live in a society that's using fear as a tactic to confuse us, and powerful people profit from our confusion.
Rick opened up his travel agency (which looks like a miniature train station) to phone callers for progressive candidates during the last election, and he is outspoken in his views that we should not be "Ugly Americans," either personally or collectively, through our behavior and policies nor should we insulate ourselves.

I have excerpted some sections from an interview with Rick which appeared in last week's Seattle Times.

RS: When I talk about travel as a political act I'm talking about how travel can change your perspective in a way that when you get home, all of a sudden you're more difficult to con...I'm saying when you travel, you find smart people who would not trade passports. You have people who are ethnocentric like you and I are, but they find other truths to be self-evident and God-given.

..Slow service is good service, instead of fast service is good service. Tolerance of alternative lifestyles. I think in Europe they've learned that society has to make a choice: you can tolerate more alternative lifestyles or you can build more prisons. And they always remind me how good we are at incarceration. We're four percent of the planet with more than a quarter of its prisoners.

If you're traveling in India, don't assume you know what pain and love and the value of time is. If you're a famous rock star, don't hang a baby out the window in Berlin. When Americans go to the Brandenburg Gate ... it frustrates those guides, because all they want to know is "Which balcony did Michael Jackson hang his baby out on?"

MR: Don't you think the teen beauty-pageant finalist's incoherent answer about why Americans can't find America on a map says all we need to know about our ignorance of the rest of the world?

RS: (Laughs.) I love that, too. That clip would not surprise people -- not even in Europe, in the developing world. It's not a fair example of an American, but you can make a case that we think we're a hub and everything relates to us. And the rest of the world interacts with each other, with or without America, which I think is real interesting. One of the most poignant moments I had last year was in Morocco, looking at a beautiful square in Tangier realizing these are successful affluent people going places and they neither
emulate America or dislike America. America doesn't even enter into their awareness. And I thought that's a beautiful thing.

MR: You're suggesting actually learning about a culture before invading it? I mean traveling to it.

RS: Yeah, I'm saying if everybody traveled before they could vote, we would not be outvoted in the United Nations routinely 130 to 4. We would not go into wars alone. We would work better with the rest of the planet.

MR: What have you observed first-hand to be the effect of the Iraq war and our current foreign policies on the way people treat American travelers?

RS: People in most countries know from first-hand experience that you can elect a person that's an embarrassment, so they cut us some slack.

MR: We don't have to see Europe through the back door now because they hate us?

RS: No, they don't hate Americans. People love Americans. Some people go over there and want to put their judgments on other people to tell them how to do things right. Europeans don't need other people to tell them how to do things right and wrong. And they don't take very well to it. As long as you go to a
country with a wide-open enthusiasm and an open mind and an interest in giving some of their ways of living a whirl, they love to have you visit. ...

MR: How does travel help?
RS: If you travel to Iraq you'd be less likely to bomb a wedding party just because one guy in the crowd was tall. I've traveled across the Middle East. I've traveled in Kurdistan in eastern Turkey and Afghanistan, and it changes the sadness of being able to look at a bombing like a video game.

MR: Are you recommending then that Americans travel in the Middle East?
RS: I think if the world knew what was good for it, it would establish a fund to pay for Americans all to have a free trip for six weeks, anywhere they wanted around the world upon graduation. It would be the best investment the world could ever make. Because right now an America that is threatened by, fearful of and misunderstands the rest of the world is a costly thing on this planet.

RS: Other people don't walk around with T-shirts that say "Proud to be Norwegian." It's inconceivable that a Norwegian or a Belgian or a Portuguese person would walk around with a T-shirt that says Proud to be Norwegian or Portuguese. Americans walk around with T-shirts that say essentially "America, love it or leave it." "America, right or wrong." "God bless America." When somebody to me says "God bless America," I think, well what about everybody else? I would advise people not to wear an American flag, because the American flag has been hijacked. It doesn't symbolize America anymore. It symbolizes an
American war around the world. That's not my opinion. That's what it means when people see that. That's changed a lot lately, and that saddens me.

RS: I used to think the world was a pyramid with us on top and everybody else trying to figure it out. And I really traveled believing I could just share with people all the beauties of American culture, and I don't believe that anymore. I like my way of living, but I don't think that other people want to copy it.

RS:What I try to do is get people to travel in a way that takes advantage of that experience to let them better understand the world, broaden their perspective through travel, to look at America through French eyes. I mean, for America to say that the French are surrender monkeys really shows what little we know about the French. Half of all their men between 15 and 30 were casualties after WWI. They lost as many people as we lost in the Vietnam War, many times on a single day. And they have one quarter of our population. There's a country that knows what war is like.

America, frankly, doesn't know what war is like. We don't have many living memories right now of what a serious war that the Europeans have experienced is. Consequently, we've sanitized it. And Europeans have many more powerful reminders of how war can devastate a society. Consequently they're inclined to find alternatives to war a little more aggressively than we are.

RS: If I grew up in some middle American state and never left the country, was surrounded by people that never left the country, I would be scared to death of Muslims. I'm not scared to death of Muslims.

My daughter just spent a month in Morocco living in a village, having a life-changing experience as a 17-year-old, and she knows that people in Morocco regardless of their religion get out of bed in the morning, and they just want to live a good life. They have no ideas in their mind to hurt America. They like
our music. They don't like our wars. They want to be left alone. They don't dress up with their whole heads covered up. They look just like our kids. They have different religious traditions.

MR: So mere exposure to Islam reveals that Muslim fanatics are about as exceptional as Christian fanatics?
RS: Exactly. I mean if all you know about Islam is what you've learned from American media, it's not much different from what Muslims have learned about Christians from Al-Jazeera.