The undesirability of heroism

Hearing Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) discuss fungal infections, abscess scars, and which diseases merit treatment was a trip in itself. But it took me a day or so to realize these are far from the hardest part about what they’re doing.

At the end of my last post I casually labelled PCVs “heroes.” But are they? If you ask them, the result in clear and resounding: not remotely. A couple minutes after posting I heard from one of my PCV friends.

I don't have photos of their daily living.
This is Georgetown on our flight back from the jungle.

“I’m uncomfortable with labelling PCVs ‘heroes.’ We’re not.” But was it just modesty, or something more nuanced than that?

“The assumption is that we have a positive impact and that’s just not necessarily true. Good intentions don’t automatically result in positive impact. The effect we have can be really mixed.”

It’s unpleasant to admit, but I see at least two reasons this is true. First, the implicit conflict of trying to help a population become more self sufficient, sustainable, and not reliant on outside aid...via outside aid. How can you convince a population to not look to foreign wealth for help when your very presence shows how helpful (and immense) that wealthy help could be?

Second, a technique that works well in one area may be either useless or downright harmful in another. Culture is complex, powerful, and sometimes dangerously subtle (right up until the moment it eats you). And it’s one of humanity’s great tragedies that the advances we most need (like women’s rights) are often earned through the suffering of exactly the people you’re trying to help. Bring a women’s initiative to a place...then watch the patriarchy clamp down.

Bauxite refining in Linden, considered among
the most luxurious placements in Guyana.

Then there’s a more personal reason PCVs dislike the “hero” label.

“There are actual heroes doing heroic things. We’re just trying to do what we can in 24 months. I just go to work like a regular person. The pressure of the term hero is...overwhelming.”

PCVs have a shadow behind their eyes, if not outright in their words. They call it “Peace Corps Guilt” (click here for a short write-up that is well worth a couple minutes read). If you’ve traveled, physically or mentally, the feeling “Good lord, we throw away more than these people have, how can I be so selfish?” will be familiar. (Don’t worry, the article’s not that bleak!)

Valid concerns, true questions, serious doubts. But in the end, the same way a politician who speaks of “good and evil” is not to be trusted, we have to acknowledge that life is not a matter of dichotomies and dualities. Nearly everything exists in shades of gray. The Peace Corps is no exception.

Going to work for a paycheck is a perfectly acceptable motivation. Doing it for the good of others or society is a wonderful thing (salute to all the teachers, nurses, and social workers out there!) But leaving behind your life of developed privileges in order to hopefully help people who have never had them, even knowing it may well be a giant waste of time?

Seven hours racing down this mudswamp of a road,
two boat rides and a 4x4 had us still nowhere
near as remote as some of the placements.

I apologize to my Peace Corps Volunteer friends...but yes, to me, you are heroes. Imperfect, perhaps useless, maybe even harmful. But you’re trying. So: heroes.

Let me add one more note. The Peace Corps lists three goals in its Mission Statement. The first is the part about helping the people in the foreign country. The third is to fostering a better understanding of poverty and foreign countries among Americans. Nestled in the middle is something important.

“To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.”

At this moment when the US is being defiled by a president whose actions genuinely merit the term “evil” and who is tangibly damaging the standing of the United States on the world stage, your contribution to international harmony (and domestic sanity, at least mine) is crucial.

Thank you for everything you do.

Living the dream

I had a dream when I was a kid. A literal, “I’m asleep” kind of dream, that is. This isn’t an inspirational post. In it, I’m swimming along the bottom of the pool, my favorite place in all of Childhood’s Kingdom, when I realize I can breathe down there. Not fully, not well, but if I calm down and do it just right, modestly, I can breathe. I remember an infusion of calm and an understanding that everything could be fantastic. Could be better than I’d known to hope for. (It wasn’t until later that I suspected I’d just rolled over and was breathing through my pillow.)

Amsterdam welcomed me my first day

This morning I’m coming up for air. After 21 days of Best of Europe tour-guiding, I’m waking up to a day without appointments, no reservations to confirm or information to convey. Not even a city to depart.

The street is polite vespas and well-dressed Parisians, nothing on my plate but baguette crumbs and the promise of more good food to come, perhaps after a stroll by the Seine? And I remember that dream. Its epiphany that I can do something I really enjoy and get the air I need while doing it. And I realize that’s what I’ve been doing for 21 days.

Swiss Alpine calm

I’ve been swimming, diving into Amsterdam’s historic harbor before turning up the Rhine to reach Austrian Alpine passes, waterfalling down Roman roads to muse about Venetian canals before making my way through old Florence to reach older Rome, just to smile and drift up into Swiss glaciers, a liquid core of calm that persists when I slide down through the vineyards of Burgundy to wash up fully rational on Seine shores.

And I’ve been breathing.

Water was an element of my boyhood joy, and travel is essential for my adult satisfaction. Sharks and me, stop moving and we suffocate. But it’s not a compulsion, not addiction, neither distraction nor delusion. It’s adoration. Adulation. Celebration of our worldwide nation and the strokes that pull us all together.

Islam is supposed to be scary? Me and
the little girl don't buy it. You?

For years I traveled. Helpless before my vagabond urges. It was right for a time, but wrong in the end. Insufficient for the long term, serving nothing but my whims. Now there’s a purpose to my travel. In a world of multimedia capitalists who profit from our fear, who compete for the spectacles that widen our eyes and shrink our horizons, I find something more worthy than mere movement when I take others with me, show them these faces of beauty left here by centuries of human struggle and millennia of natural process.

For twenty one days spread across half a dozen countries we delight in the reality of the places, rooms in our global house, and I watch the tension of the first day dissolve into the ease of the last. Day One I see apprehension when I show them the train track that will reliably bring them home, Day Twenty I drop them off in Paris’s elegant metro maze and say “See you tomorrow” and they’re off without a pause.

And in the calm, when they don’t need me at all, I can imagine them going home, feeling merely tired, to be greeted by the anxious homebound with their pinched brows who desperately inquire “You were in Europe? But weren’t you worried? Didn’t you feel unsafe?”

And in my daydream I see their calm smile, perhaps wearing the appropriate regret for the incidents of the moment, but underneath is the deep understanding that the world is something other than the misconception made up by those make-up talking heads. And my traveling companions ease back to a full library of happy moments, warm welcomes, beautiful humanity and they can shrug off the constipated clench of petty terror. Stories they know better than to buy, now.

Think they wish they'd spent more time fearful and divided?

No, they didn’t feel unsafe. They felt free. If I did my job right. And the memory of every one of their smiles resonates within me, and I feel that dream’s sense of delighted astonishment, astonished delight, and can pull in deep lungfuls of fresh air.

Maybe it’s an inspiration post after all. For me, anyway.

Europe's normalcy and hospitality are waiting, on every boulevard and back street.

A gift from a fellow traveler

It was another vacation weekend. Sitting on the beach with two of my favorite people, my telephone far away, unchecked, the madness of the modern moment unimportant before the relentless majesty of an ocean.

Then back to this side of reality, the profanities of each day’s presidential manipulations and depredations. Trump standing in front of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, “This plane, as you know, was built right here in the great state of South Carolina. Our goal as a nation must be to rely on less imports and more products made here in the USA.”

Because it doesn’t matter to him that the fuselage comes from Italy. The wings from Japan. Passenger doors from France. That Boeing would suffer bigly under his backward agenda of tariffs and isolationism. He doesn’t understand or care that modern reality is not one of warring city-states but of progress through cooperation. The sad shriveled soul of an insecure narcissist cannot fathom cooperation or trust. They are not in his nature, and I pity the human in him.

But in the meantime he’s trashing the rest of us. And my mind wants to go back and hide on that beach...watching the waves...eating that sandwich...hearing the laughter and words of loved ones…

But what’s going on matters. And it’s bleak, in reality and in the headlines. So it was all the more precious to get an email from a former tour member:

Paris is picnics on the Seine.
Whether you're wearing a hijab or not.

“I thought of you today when I read about Trump’s bashing of Paris. I want you to know that the Paris you showed (my husband), me, and the rest of our wonderful group was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life...the amazing sites, the rich history, the art, the kindness of the people and well, of course, the food and wine. While Trump’s distortion of reality makes me feel quite hopeless at times, I know first-hand that his ‘alternate reality’ is dead wrong--thanks to you.”

And suddenly the sun feels warmer, my heart feels lighter, and I feel connected with the real human spirit, which is welcoming, encompassing, and kind. Which seeks to understand and support, not belittle and blame. Which is exactly the understanding we seek to foster on Rick Steves tours. It's immensely gratifying to know I succeeded at least once.

85% of those Dreamliners are sold overseas, and each one can carry about 300 people like my tour members towards greater understanding of each other, community with each other, peace with ourselves.

It’s still important to take short breaks from the dire headlines. But even more important to remember that they are not the full story.

My experience with refugees

(I’ve taught English at the International Rescue Committeehttps://www.rescue.org/ for the last two years, and wrote this for a fundraiser last weekend that raised $2,800 for the ACLU and IRC. I am honored to have been a small part of that fundraiser, and encourage anyone to follow it up with support for these incredible organizations, more important now than ever. And deepest thanks for my friend Jane Bloch who edited and read the piece for me, as I could not attend in person.)

Nasim is in class today. His basic vocabulary and visible pride merge as he tells me about Baghdad before the violence. We agree that when peace comes, and he believes it will, he will show me his city. As always, he presses his hand to his heart in thanks as he leaves.

The family of four from Myanmar sit next to him. The mother and father are improving their English bit by bit, but their two sons, aged 8 and 11, are learning as fast as I can challenge them. They were among the Rohingya “boat people” who fled repeated attacks on Muslims by the Buddhist majority in their country. But as they compete to tell me about the pizza they ate last night, their first, “boat people” is not a concept or a headline, it’s these people. Real people. My neighbors, our community.

Amanuel is a young Eritrean man. He finished a baking certification class this morning and has brought me three fresh pumpkin spice chocolate chip cookies. There is quiet pride in his eyes at having something to give. I think he is slowly-slowly seeing that it’s okay to be gay here. I wish I could express how thankful I am that he’s here. He doesn’t know how much he gives me every day. Or how much he reminds me to be thankful for my own brother’s experience, whose own coming out was accepted with love by our family.

And Shayma is here! She is my best student. Syrian, she started with zero English, not even a shared alphabet, and after just three weeks she’s helping the other Arabic speakers. Today she brought little Zeinah, her two year old daughter who loves escaping from the classroom to toddle down the halls and say hello to everyone. We don’t even chase Zeinah anymore, knowing some IRC staff member will invariably bring her back with a huge smile on their face.

Finally, to my right sit Mutaz and Fatima. Grandparents from Sudan, their dignity and kindness are soothing just to be around. Mutaz just got his first job here. In Khartoum he was a university professor. In Walnut Creek he will change sheets in a hotel. He does not complain. Not a word.

Fatima approaches me after class with a piece of paper in her hand. “On Tuesday I told you how I taught Arabic to an American woman using Sudanese proverbs,” she reminds me. I loved the idea and had asked her about them. Now she unfolds the sheet and shows me lines of graceful Arabic above precise English translations. “I wrote some of them down for you.”

She reads them to me, first in Arabic then in English. “A child is a child of everyone.” Her pronunciation is clean and clear, just a soft underlayer of her homeland below the words. “You who dig a hole for evil, make your space in it.” Her words sound like her ancestors, my ancestors, our ancestors. “Seek the neighbor, before the house.”

In Arabic the proverbs rhyme, but I prefer the English versions, which sound like different cultures meeting in shared humanity. All three speak directly to the understanding and purpose of the IRC.

A child is a child of everyone because we are all neighbors, all one community, whether we’re born in Sudan, Syria, or San Francisco.

You who dig a hole for evil, make your space in it rings painfully true as our leaders make mistakes in the name of power and greed.

And finally, Seek the neighbor, before the house. It’s the person who matters, not the distractions of wealth or status, nationality or creed.

It’s pretty normal for me to feel like I am the student, learning more than I have to teach, when I come to the IRC. I’ve been fortunate to teach English in half a dozen countries and have felt that way before, but I’ve never had classes like these.

Normally in beginner English we talk a lot about about family and background. “Is your brother short, or tall? Is your town big, or small? Is your home clean, or messy?” But here, their home might be rubble, their towns occupied or destroyed, and their brothers….

Early in my days at the IRC, I saw my predecessor make an honest mistake. She asked an Afghani man about his children. He told us he had five. Three sons and two daughters. He told us he didn’t know if he’d ever see them again. He told us he didn’t even know if they were still alive. He sat, and he cried. And there was not a thing we could do to fix it.

According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, rates of PTSD among refugees range from 39 to 100%. In comparison to 1% for the general population. 39%, to 100%.

All of my students are mourning something, but whereas someone in mourning might want to talk about the sadness in their heart, asking someone with PTSD about it can put them back into that original place of trauma. I wish I knew how to help more, but all I know is a little about teaching. And a little about refugees.

Here’s some of what I know. Refugees don’t come to America for a handout. They don’t come to take anyone’s job. They come because they are like you and me. They want to live, they want to earn an honest day’s wage, and they want to raise their children without fear of bullets or starvation.

When I hear politicians disparage and blame refugees, I feel anger, and I feel fear. But when I hear regular people speak against them, I just want to invite them to class with me. Prejudice and fear, contempt and aggression, none of these would survive ten minutes at a table with my students.

They are good people whose previous lives would have looked a lot like yours and mine. Family and friends. Work and play. Traditions and celebrations. Mourning in the natural course of time. Instead they have endured unimaginable suffering. And now they’re here, learning a whole new...everything. New rules, new society, and a new language, with its inexplicable spellings and baffling vowels. This transition is brutal, unjust, and some days surreal. But every class feels like a victory anyway.

Because they made it. Against all odds and overcoming excruciating obstacles. But they got here. To live. To heal. To feel hope again. That is the true beauty of America. That is what it really means to live in a land of tolerance, a land of opportunity, a land of the free.

God bless America, refugees welcome.

Gratitude, sadness, and mom

Good morning Mom! How’s it going? Have you had a meditation time already? I’m going to do one at 11:00 if you want to do yours at the same time. I’m going to aim for 10 minutes, but 5 would be okay too.

It is the first day. This Tuesday. A Tuesday. The only one that exists, while we wait for it to vanish. But it’s the Tuesday after last Friday, that day of operation and inauguration, when every lung seemed to be holding what breath it could, waiting to see if the unthinkable would continue to happen.

It did. President Trump. Jesus Christ, I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to that. I fear I will. Trauma grown normal. And yes, the inauguration happened, followed by even more assault rifle spray of things to be upset about, from alternative facts to the ongoing competition for most unqualified cabinet pick (I have my “winner”).

But brutal circumstance gave me a different main memory for January 20, 2017, the day my mother had her heart surgery. She went in as scheduled, conscious sedation as discussed, and the surgeon did his thing as practiced thousands of times. It all went according to plan. Until it didn’t.

Bronze copy of Michelangelo's Pieta in the Grotto,
looking out over the Willamette River Valley.

The procedure failed. The problem was beyond their reach. I can’t imagine how it felt for my mother, when she came back to awareness and turned to ask the nurse “Did it work?”

How did it feel, when the nurse answered? “No. I’m sorry.”

I don’t want my mom to live forever. That would be a torture beyond reckoning. I just don’t want her to ever die. But here we are, confronted with the benevolent brutality that life ends. All of it. It’s a good thing in theory, but damn it sucks in practice.

But this is too dire. This personal talk of death. This national talk of dissolution. The future has its problems. Its ominous possibility. But today? Today the human spirit is strong. Love is strong. Stronger than doom. I love my mother. I still love my country. And on Saturday my mom brought smiles to everyone she met. And all across the nation the goodness in this country took to the streets to reject intolerance, to embrace support, to deny the divisiveness of a small-souled man who wants us to forget how much we love.

Unity in compassion and concern for each other. Such a beautiful sight. (NBC's photo)

My mom is wonderfully alive. Recovered from her surgery, she has many positive memories still to make. Some small changes can enhance that, and I’m not going to expect her to do them alone. Change doesn’t happen in isolation. Neither does democracy. So I’m going to join every day with a spirit of “What can I do today to foster the health and healing I want to see?”

It won’t solve every problem. No magician here, to polish the future to a paradise shine. But sure beats dwelling in gloom. Health, national or personal, doesn’t happen in an instant or in isolation. And in that interdependency, we are stronger.

Why you should go to Istanbul

Sultanahmet Camii, aka The Blue Mosque, near where I was walking

“Hello! You walk like an American” said the smiling stranger in Istanbul’s Sultanahmet Square. How was I walking? Having been to the city a few times, I knew where I was going but felt no hurry in the constant beauty of that incredible city. Did this relaxed confidence mark me as an American? What a terribly lovely idea.

It wasn’t the sort of association I would have expected on my first visit, when I arrived rank with trepidation as to how the locals might view my American nationality. But now it wasn’t that surprising, after those nerves had been immediately dispelled by the undeniable hospitality and irresistible kindness of the Turkish people.

It didn’t take long. I remember the students who jumped to help me on my first train ride in from Ataturk Airport, when I didn’t know to transfer at Zeytinburnu. Their eager words and laughter made me feel I was among friends already.

Baklava and cai with my
brother on a later visit

And at the hotel I remember the staff’s good humor and patience as I puzzled through “teşekkür ederim” to say thank you. It’s a phrase I needed a lot, for those who helped me navigate the sections of that incomparable city, the vendors and waiters who brought me Turkey’s delicious cuisine, and for the advice from friends I made on the ferry from Kadiköy to Beşiktaş, crossing back to Europe after a day in Asia.

The phrase was easy by the time I left Selçuk and automatic before I reached Fethiye. Then I learned its Kurdish counterpart in Diyarbakir and used it often as I wandered the beautiful present and past of Mardin and Hasankeyf, then was humbled by the help of a man in Batman. So much more than a superhero chuckle!

People love to ask a traveler where their favorite place is, and I never quite know how to answer. Though Holland and Nepal come to mind quickly, the most common answer I give is Turkey. In its ancient cities and modern comforts, natural beauty and human kindness, Turkey has something wonderful for every visitor. And none of it should be forgotten in the face of the human vileness of these terrorist attacks.

Why is Turkey the target of so much violence? Several answer for this, from modern politics to ethnic history, but one particular reason stands out, essential to remember when it comes to Turkey.

Inside the Hagia Sophia, a church that became a mosque and
is now a museum. Peace and welcome for all.

Turkey represents hope. Established by Ataturk in 1923, Turkey was born a secular nation whose political, religious, social, and economic changes modernized the country and made it a bastion of stability and freedom in a Middle East wracked by war and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

To focus: Turkey was founded as a secular nation in an Muslim region, and with balance and freedom it has thrived. That’s why it’s under attack by Daesh. Because Turkey, with its concrete demonstration of harmony between modern western culture and Islam, is a threat to those small minds who want us to think Islam is somehow at war with Christianity. It shows the lie of those sad souls who want us to think the Middle East is an opponent of the West. It laughs at those who suggest that we brothers and sisters are somehow enemies.

That’s why they’re attacking Turkey.

And that’s why we should keep visiting.

Terrorists want us to stay home and fear. Instead, I choose the many sites and pleasures of visiting Istanbul, from the markets of its Asian shore to the Golden Horn, including Sultanahmet Square where that man, after saying I walked like an American, invited me to çai with him in his carpet shop.

I know, what a cliche, the Turk inviting you to the carpet shop. It is. And it happens. And yes it’s probably a sales pitch. But it’s so much more. He knew I wasn’t going to buy anything, and invited me anyway. We sat and drank tea from tulip glasses and he beamed when I told him I’d visited and loved his hometown to the east. And when his coworker insisted on showing me some samples, including one that was $420, my newest Turkish friend found it hilarious when I told him that 420 is synonymous with marijuana in America.

We were not enemies, that man and I. Nor are America and Turkey. And we should never be enemies, the West and the Middle East. In Turkey you can visit that. You can sit at the table and watch the unity of the human spirit, as currents flow between continents on the historic streets of an incomparable city.

You can even walk like an American and make a man chuckle at pot.

I want to go back to Istanbul.

Yeni Cami, aka The New Mosque, in Istanbul. (More photos on the vagabondurges.com version)

What to say about 2016?

Hands Around Lake Merritt gave me hope

2016. Whew. What do you say about this year? A year of plotlines that would have made dubious fiction, played out in the newspapers instead. I tried to make a concise list of the most egregious stories but google ran out of memory. And it was downright depressing. Made me want to find Merrick Garland and go get drunk down by the pier together.

So just the most salient point: 2016 is the year democracy failed. The British voted against their own best interests. Colombians rejected peace in the world’s longest running civil war (if you don’t count the murderous chaos in Myanmar). And then, inevitably, Trump.

But I don’t want to focus on that right now. That would be like the man with whom I went to Cuba who could only talk about the toilet seats. (Or maybe what goes through them would be a better metaphor?)

Watching the cows come home in Switzerland did me good

Personally, 2016 was (of course) a mixed bag. I lost the relationship I thought would last the rest of my life. But how wonderful to have had that love! And I have hope that some form of it will continue into the future. Pesky future, being all unknowable.

Professionally, I expanded into a job I feel inexpressibly lucky to have. I had truly incredible groups this year. Let’s be honest, Rick Steves groups are always great, we just draw from good people, who travel for the right reasons and in the right way, but this year was above even our high bar.

Perhaps when the news is preaching fear, those who come into the world anyway are the cream of the crop. People who know that staying home is exactly the wrong response to terrorism. Who refuse to be terrorized. (Or at least who know there is extremely little actual danger involved. Terrorism is still less dangerous than driving to work.) I am grateful for my company, and for the people who travel with us. Best of the best, they are.

Beautiful and bizarre Skopje, Macedonia

And I am grateful for the incredible people at the International Rescue Committee, both the staff and my students. Again I am privileged to meet the best. I wish my students’ confidentiality wasn’t an issue, because their stories and characters would benefit the nation to hear. They’re an antidote to Trumpism.

And finally travel, one of the great joys of my life, was good this year. On a Balkan ramble I enjoyed Bulgaria, was happily surprised by Macedonia, and felt love in Greece. Then this last trip, to Vietnam, where I felt a perspective that might make 2017 a more loving place within me. The articulation is still burbling in my subconscious, but for now I can focus on one truth.

Humans are good. We really are. We are a good species. Too good for our own sake, maybe, since it’s mostly our worst individuals who yearn for power. Anyone who wants to be in control...is exactly who shouldn’t be allowed to.

The Vietnamese people have forgiven a horrible war.
That gives me hope.

That makes for troublesome headlines, but a deeply reassuring foundation. I don’t know exactly how many countries I’ve visited or people I’ve met, but I can happily tell you that in every single one of them I met wonderful people. Almost exclusively. People I would live next to, eat with, and have in my life.

Every country, and every year. 2016 was a beast. No doubt about it. But it had such goodness in there! And 2017 will have that beauty too. Happy new year, my friends!

It's all one world

My bus pulled up for a WC break on the way to Phuong Nha, Vietnam. A man drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, Germany. Thousands of miles apart, but it’s all one world. And lately it feels like it’s all going to shit.

But it’s not. And Vietnam has reminded me of that.

Found these in an overgrown lot in Hue. Not on anyone's Things to See List.

When my demographic thinks “Vietnam” we think of pho (soup), Vietnamese friends, stories heard or told of travel’s beauty here. And probably those movies about someone else’s war. I arrived knowing little about it beyond what Oliver Stone told me and it’s entirely possible I could have left without learning much more.

The possibility is both troubling and beautiful. Troubling, because visitors, especially Americans, should know about what happened here during the twenty morally reprehensible years of war my country inflicted on this region in order to take away their freedom and advance our economic interests.

But beautiful because of the way the people here have talked to me about the war. 40 years is long enough to fade from America’s awareness but not to erase the memories from those who saw it firsthand. Trauma like that stays with an individual and a society, whether you fought or not, your village burned or not, your family died or not.

Yet when my bus pulled in for that bathroom break and I got to chatting with the driver in words and gestures, he communicated the same thing I’ve heard again and again in this wonderful country (if I bring it up).

Would it matter where she's from? How
she worships? No. You'd protect her too

“You say ‘I from America’ and” he made that relaxed shoulder shrug gesture of peacefulness. “No problem! America, Vietnam, friend friend! War is over. Friend friend!” He wanted me to know that even if his father was in the war, even if we were about to drive over Hien Luong Bridge that divided North and South, even if these towns watched their children die and the very land burned bare by toxins dropped without conscience, that’s in the past, and he holds no grudge. Feels no separation between us. And that’s what I’m holding on to today.

Because there are people trying to pull us apart. They are small in number and vast in influence. They want this religion to blame that religion. This nationality to hate that nationality. These people at peace to distrust those people fleeing war. Our division is their gain. Our fear is their advantage. And our misplaced antipathy is our own destruction.

Because Berlin is Phuong Nha is Damascus is San Francisco. It’s all one world. We’re all one people. And if my Vietnamese bus driver, whose father was killed by a US bomb, can pat me on the shoulder and share his food then we are brothers, no matter what came before. And my German friends, regardless of what faced our grandparents, are all family on this sad day. As are my Syrian friends, grieving kin as bombs murder the entire city of Aleppo, feeling our anger but united in hope for a better future for us all.

That's exactly it. Vietnamese kid in a New York shirt,
and it's the peace sign for everyone.

So yes, lately it feels like it’s all going to shit. And in some ways damn right it is. But then again, maybe it always feels like it’s going that way, every year’s “lately.” But the fact I cling to, the firsthand observation I trust, is that even if some other guy drove a truck into a market today, my guy drove our bus to a moment of friendship. And the latter is more common by far. The latter is the majority, the hope, and the future.

Yes it’s all one world. And no it’s not all going to shit.