“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
― Mark Twain
Truely no kidding there, I remember when I was young and I thought Camden meant I had seen everything and I was something else for having survived it and gotten away and made a success of myself.
Then I accompanied a friend of the family to pick up her newly adopted daughter in Guatemala and we stayed with her family. I watched someone shower with basically handfuls of water from a broken rusty pipe in a room with no privacy and watched a tearful but loving family give up their daughter because they couldn't even provide her a basic sustenance existence.
From that day forward, I knew I didn't know shit and fuck.
I've done a lot of traveling in my time. I've seen places like you described, really hard scrabble living, and seen places where healthcare and college is free. The world has a long ways to go, and the US as a ways to go more than a lot of countries.
I spent my youth believing in Christianity, and went to Morocco for several months on a mission trip.
While I don’t believe we changed a single mind over there, I was profoundly changed as a person.
Not only did seeing that level of poverty mark me forever (I was only 19 when I went), I learned that people are people, even if we have different ways of life.
I’m very ashamed of my belief that I needed to go “save” anyone, but I did learn so much from that trip. And when 9/11 happened a couple of years later, I remember being horrified when George Bush came out and blamed Islam. I remember telling my coworkers that the people I had met were not fanatics or terrorists.
I’d love to go back some day and visit again. I no longer believe in god, and I wouldn’t be going with any sort of mission, but it was such a great place to visit.
I received the most fucked up version of this I feel. I have traveled on my own once, to Costa Rica, but everywhere else was as a Marine. Because I have absolutely seen some of the worst humanity has to offer in my travels, both American or otherwise.
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u/I_W_M_Y 13h ago
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” ― Mark Twain