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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
The American non-traveler: What's the price of staying put? Plus: When airline pilots have the opportunity to roam widely, but choose not to.
By Patrick Smith
Read more: Technology & Business, Flying, Airlines, Business, Airports, P. Smith, Ask the Pilot
Oct. 24, 2008 | Before getting started, I would like to express my appreciation for your many flattering comments in response to last week's story about the African slum and the injured hedgehog. It was not an easy column to write, and I worried that feedback would not be positive.
Still, though, I beg to differ that the piece was, as one e-mailer called it, "by order of magnitude better" than anything I've published in the past. Granted, the subject matter was a bit headier than my usual fare, and I was happy with the finished product. But I wouldn't rank it my best.
Not that you asked, but if I were to choose my favorite columns to date, the list would go like this:
First place goes to my meditation on fate and fear, set on board a cargo jet flying from Belgium to New York City.
Next in line would be the piece I wrote about the time my copilot and I were faced with a near emergency and a planeload of obsessed Japanese tourists. Part 1 ran on June 6, 2008. Part 2 followed a week later.
Then there's the true tale of a near-death experience over Nantucket Sound with the beautiful Dorothy Meyer.
Another sentimental fave is my quasi-memoir of pranks and planes at Logan International.
Rounding out the greatest hits are my description of the flotsam and jetsam around America's most colorful airport, and the night I spent wandering through JFK.
Several of the above were published fairly recently, but in fact most of them -- the rough drafts, at least -- were written several years ago. They form the main body of what was intended to be a loosely chronological book titled "Half the Fun -- Pains, Planes, and Places in a Life Aloft." Though seeing how I failed to find an agent interested in pitching this brilliant and hilarious tome, perhaps they're not as good as I think.
But enough with the cheap attempt at generating clicks for old columns. Getting back to that masterpiece about the slum and the hedgehog ...
During the story I lamented what I called the average American's "geographical know-nothingness and lack of interest in visiting foreign countries." I caught a little flak for that. One reader called me a snob, and another accused me of "insulting hardworking Americans who, unlike you, can't simply jet around the world for free."
I am well aware that not everybody has the money to fly thousands of miles on soul-searching missions. Somehow that misses the point. The truth is that too many Americans are shamefully, even willfully uninterested in the world beyond their borders, and have at best a superficial awareness of world geography. In 2002, a National Geographic survey revealed that 85 percent of Americans between ages 18 and 24 could locate neither Afghanistan nor Iraq on a map. Sixty-nine percent could not find Great Britain, and nearly 33 percent of young Americans believed the U.S. population to be between 1 billion and 2 billion.
It was painfully apropos, I thought, to learn that vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin had only recently acquired a passport, and with the exception of a highly choreographed political trip to the Middle East, has never been abroad save for a family vacation in Mexico. I find it astonishing, if not frightening, that millions of citizens apparently have no problem with this.
We need to ask ourselves: Is it healthy for the citizens of a nation with so much power, economic and military, to be so oblivious and xenophobic? Aren't global influence and global ignorance, in the end, mutually exclusive? Not to take this too far -- and surely it's a leap to draw national security into the mix, at least directly -- but on some level, as citizens, we ignore the rest of world at our peril. And while the waning of American exceptionalism cannot be blamed on something so simple, isn't this, deep down, part of the problem?
As I was saying a week ago, I am of the mind that every American student, in exchange for financial aid, ought to be conscripted into a semester (or more) of overseas service. And why not a tax credit for certain international travel, similar to that provided with the purchase of a hybrid car. Perhaps then we wouldn't have such a vulgar sense of entitlement and a shallow worldview.
Which, as I took pains to explain, is not to idealize or romanticize the act of travel. There is plenty of beauty and splendor in the world, it's true. But there is just as much despair, poverty, pollution and corruption. And it is the latter, maybe, that is the more valuable for us to experience firsthand.
That being said, no, I do not believe the physical act of travel, however beneficial it might be, is absolutely critical to one's understanding of the world. (I would like to give Ms. Palin the benefit of the doubt on this one, but something urges me not to.) It is possible, I admit, to be adequately knowledgeable and informed without ever setting foot outside the United States. By the same token, there are plenty of raving xenophobes who have traveled widely.
Still others have the opportunity to travel widely, but choose not to. I should know because I have worked with them.
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