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.

We are not at war. But if we're lucky and smart, Trump might be just as good as.

War is hell. I’ll take that as a given. But humans seem to have an addiction to it. Sometimes they come close, a veteran of The War to End All Wars coming back to start the next a couple decades later, but overall in the modern era, we have a roughly 70 year loop. Why?

The American Cemetery outside Florence, for servicemen killed in WWII

If a generation is vaguely 30 years, then it’s about as soon as enough people don’t grow up with firsthand stories of how awful it was, don’t get that ingrained memory of what we’re really talking about when we rattle the sabers. It’s not politics. It’s not pride. It’s suffering of a scale and intensity most of us can’t imagine, no matter how many times we see Saving Private Ryan.

As I study history, comparing nations and centuries, I see a recurring pattern. It’s a blog so I’ll summarize:

We have a war. Then we spend the next generation and a half improving human society. Reminded of just how important peace is, of what really matters in life, and of our communal humanity, we don’t mind contributing a piece of our paycheck to create a social order that preserves us. We know that this is not only ethically right, but in our own self interest.

Cemetery in Riga, Latvia. Born in 1931 I bet that military
man understood how serious talk of war really is.

Then we forget. Those years click by and we start to see Us and Them as different, and say “They don’t deserve My time or concern or money.” Especially the money, god help us. So we clamp down, get mean, regress, let the hot momentary emotions overrule the deeper warm ones.

And so we repeat.

70 year loop? It’s been years since WWII. (The Vietnam War in all this is another post.) I look at the actions of the Trump Administration and the cheers of the people who think They Muslims don’t have a place in Our America, and I see forgetfulness. I see people who’ve forgotten what it is to be a refugee, to be vulnerable, to be threatened by guns instead of terrorized by Fox News.

The school converted to Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh.
Cambodia remembers, and does not threaten war.

So what now? Do we have to go to war? I don’t think we do. God I hope we don’t. We can remember what’s at stake, how foolish it is to respond to concerns and suspicion with aggression. That dropping bombs on one terrorist makes 10 more in his place. That turning our backs on those in need shows moral bankruptcy and reason for villification. We can realize that demonizing Islam is working with ISIS/Daesh to create an artificial religious war.

Basically, by seeing the awful policies and rhetoric of the Trump administration, if we do it right, we can relearn the lesson of what really matters in life. Without pulling a trigger.

Or we can do it the old way.

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.

A Parisian response to fear

I was focused on the situation so don't have
good photos, but man it was fun and loud

What do you do when terrorists want you to be afraid? To be closed off, fearful of strangers, and angry? To stay locked in your house, suspicious of others, scared of crowds and skittish of loud noises? Well, if you’re Paris, you throwing a mutha-phunking techno parade to draw in the crowds and blast out the windows, that’s what you do.

Because screw fear! Sucks to your divisiveness! And extremists can kiss my unafraid not-shut-in tolerant liberal western ass! It’s time for a party so loud everyone’s invited whether they like it or not. Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Zoroastrian, and Animist, I don’t care, if you have eardrums, you’re at the party.

And who cares if modern music seems to have forgotten musical instruments, because for the moment all we need is the sort of gut-thumping noise that makes everyone feel the rhythm in their ribs and the beat in the bloodstream as our hearts accelerate to match.

And if it’s my tour group, midway through my Paris walk, caught and beached somewhere between the converted church and the place where the boy king’s life changed forever? Oh well! Change of plans! We’re travelers: we adapt. And so we hold off on the French Revolution for a moment and instead lift cell phone cameras to the beautiful and blissfully idiotic thudding of a techno resistance movement. And if that swarm is hefting bottles of booze to the sky? Good for them. Ain’t nobody driving, ain’t nobody fighting, but all of everybody is moving and defiantly alive. Tolerating each other, who cares how you dress, if you can sing, or whether you pray and to whom.

Paris is unafraid, and these thousands of hoarse shouting, public drinking, sexual tension exploding, uncovered, unashamed, and celebrating youngsters are going to make sure you know it.

Because Paris is a city attacked. Once by terrorists, and repeatedly by fear. A city maligned by well-meaning purveyors of information, and by loving and thoughtful individuals who are right to feel fear, but wrong to act on it.

How did my group act on it? Did they stay home and huddle in front of the panic-inducing television? Nope, they came and saw for themselves. And when I asked them in the Champs de Mars if any of them felt afraid of Paris, they laughed. The correct response. They’d seen for themselves that fear on this global scale is a packaged commodity you don’t have to wear. And shouldn’t. Because locked inside, it’s quiet and safe and dead and complicit. But outside? In the traveler’s world, the citizen’s reality, the truth of the shared experience? It’s doing just fine.

Paris is alive and well. It is not unsafe, and it is not dangerous. Nor is it afraid and lashing out. It’s alive. It’s joie de vivre. It’s all those hearts beating defiantly together, celebrating and loud.  Can you hear it from there?

What Brussels is to me

A random street in Schaerbeek, a Brussels neighborhood just
across the tracks from the now infamous Molenbeek.

Brussels? The first memory that comes to mind is feeling like an episode of The Office had leaked into real life. These guys, with their corny jokes and awkward attempts at flirting, worked for a paper company. It was just so perfect.

I’d contacted a Belgian tour company and they’d sent me to tag along with these business trippers for an hour. I was fascinated by the improbable story of Belgian independence, but they mostly talked about sports, and the only thing I wrote down was “Don’t talk about something you can’t show.” Can’t say I’ll always obey that edict, now that I am a guide, nor can I follow it in this post

Because how can I show the swirl of emotion as very different images from Brussels slam into the news? The horror and sorrow and empathy and anger and confusion and sick knowledge that this happens much more often in a few other countries, and is no less horrible in commonality than rarity, perhaps only more so.

And fear. That’s in there too. But not fear of a terrorist attack, which I still believe is not something you or I will ever actually experience. Shark attacks, plane crashes, terrorist attacks. They are scary, they happen, but they are not factors in how I choose to plan my life. I like swimming, I take a lot of flights, and I believe there is far more goodness, more peace, in the human soul than violence.

I never did find out what was going on
with this. Somewhere in Brussels.

No, the fear I feel is that we will assist the extremists in their goals. That we will respond in exactly the wrong way. Because that conviction of mankind’s goodness is difficult to maintain sometimes. In myself, when I feel the desire to see someone punished for the violence, and the first image is more explosions, and I wait for my animal amygdala to give way to my human neocortex, which understands that violence only creates more violence.

And that fear is strong, that conviction of human goodness strained, when I watch the Republican primaries, and the bragging demonstration of a viewpoint that scorns such understanding. Scorns much understanding at all, as far as I can tell. It seems clear to me that Donald Trump is running on a platform of willful ignorance, and such arrogant idiocy has never been more dangerous.

Because make no mistake, the lunatics who killed people in Brussels would like nothing better than to see Trump elected. Their gameplan is fear, anger, reaction. Us versus Them. No comprehension, no discussion, no progress, only a devolution to a world of warring tribes and caliphates. That’s what terrorism does. It removes the evolved brain from the decision-making process. As I’ve written before, terrorism is the strategy of the weak.

Brussels is not a city of fear. This statue gives me an idea
of how I'd like to mentally respond to Trump's candidacy.

I for one do not want to live in that kind of world. I’d rather live in this one, where awkward businessmen in semi-fitting suits can ignore tour guides while I sit in the back of the bus, a peaceful piece of person afloat in a beautiful world, because even though that world has its problems, I have faith that humans are determined to make positive progress towards a better future.

Or you can vote for Trump.

The good thing about terrorism.

Here’s something you already knew: the Dark Ages were F’ing brutal. I’ve been studying those terrible centuries for my job, and they were worse than I realized. Someone doesn’t like you and says they saw you talking to the devil? You’re probably going to be burned alive. Sometimes slowly, on a pile of dried feces, maybe after they rip your tongue out. (These were all Christians, by the way.) There are lots more examples, worse ones, but let’s move on.

It was a privilege to be in El Salvador to witness their election
last year, and congratulations to Myanmar in their fairest
election in a quarter century.

Back then, each town, family, and even guild often maintained their own armed force, and violence was the point of entry into the political process. You basically had to be violent in order to have a voice. Violence was assumed. Normal. And life was terrible. Then, magnificently, over the course of multiple centuries, we created a world in which political violence became nearly absent. (In parts of the world, that is. The parts where I’m sitting, and you most likely are too.)

This accomplishment should not be taken for granted, lest we can forget that we’re living in the safest time and place in human history. That gratitude and perspective are essential in combating terrorism. For millennia, violence was random and rampant, with no accountability or even reason. Then nation-states arose, and for a while they went to war, supercharged by the mechanization of murder. Now, with rare exceptions, Vladimir, nations do not invade each other anymore. We transfer immense amounts of power through entirely peaceful means. Our elections are still far from 100% fair, but they’re a helluva lot better than settling inheritance by the sword, as was the rule for centuries, in kingdoms, families, and even monasteries.

"All" Muslims are whatnow?

Now, in this peaceful world, where vast numbers of people cooperate on a basic level, terrorism has found a new potency by virtue of its exceptionality. If religious nutjobs killed twenty people in 1215, it wouldn’t have made the papers, partially because there were no papers, but also because it wouldn’t have been particularly interesting. Terrorism only exists when we’ve gotten used to safety. That’s the good news, that we’re actually incredibly safe. The bad news is that in our strength, we face the risk of being toppled by a relatively insignificant threat.

Because terrorism is the technique of the weak. It belongs to those groups who know that they cannot win, cannot even fight a real battle. They are weak, so all they can do is provoke you, hoping that in your response, you will make them strong.

ISIS wants a religious war, Muslims versus everyone else. That is not the current reality. They are a small minority, massively disapproved of, even in Muslim countries. Everyone hates them. And they’re weak. Yes, they took over a lot of territory very quickly, but it was territory that was barely held by anyone else. And at the time, the people thought (as they always do) that “The new guys will be better!” That illusion didn’t last long. (My lady and I heard a similar story about the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, when people, unhappy with the status quo, welcomed a change, until they saw that the news guys were worse. Then it took a few years to get rid of them.)

ISIS wants us to lump all Muslims together and blame them all, and they want us to “protect our freedom” by sacrificing it. They want us to reject refugees, and so far, 30 Republican governors and one Democrat have come out strongly in favor of ISIS. By opposing the victims of ISIS, they are effectively aligning themselves with it.

Is that how we will respond? Will we do exactly what ISIS wants us to do, and be manipulated into hating the wrong people? Will we take our anger and fear, and turn them into mistrust and segregation, and in so doing, work far more effectively than ISIS ever could towards creating the Islam vs Everyone Else war that they seek?

Responding to Paris. Islam is not the problem.

Inside a mosque in Malaysia

What can one say about what happened in Paris last week? How to adequately address this manifestation of humanity’s darkest potential? I’m not sure how to do it well, but I’ve seen some examples of how to do it incredibly poorly.

So, as John Oliver said: “after the many necessary and appropriate moments of silence”, I want to shout that this, as all of these incidents, is not a situation of Islam versus The West, nor Christianity, nor democracy, nor anything else. This is a case of Extremism versus Human Decency.

If you’ve met any Muslims through any medium other than TV “news” you know that they are people. Not terrorists, not extremists. People. Just like you and I. I wish I could take anyone who says differently with me to my class, where tables full of Syrian, Iraqi, Rohingya, Eritrean, and other refugees show me the true face of human kindness, the profound depth of human decency. They are solidly on “our side”. The talking heads of the TV networks on the other hand, seem solidly on the side of extremism. The danger of that is insidious and shameful.

Being a boy in rural Turkey

This misunderstanding of the nature of the conflict is what allows “our” government (and its business interests) to pursue the “War on Terror.” The tragedy of that strategy goes far beyond my ability to express. You can not go to war with Terrorism. It is an idea, not an opponent. It’s like trying to dry your clothes by spraying them with the garden hose. It only makes the problem worse.

We’ve seen, time and time again, that “our” bombs don’t just land on extremists. They land on innocents, and bystanders, and angry people, and sad people, and markets, and schools, and hospitals, and weddings. For every extremist “we” kill, we create a dozen more. We’re standing in the sun, hoping it will cure our sunburn.

Somewhere in Tanzania

You already know this. Every child knows this. Little Jimmy says Tommy is a doodoo head. The other kids aren’t so sure, Tommy seems fine to them, though he doesn’t share his potato chips very well. Then Tommy comes up and punches Jimmy in the face. Now everyone agrees, Tommy is a complete asshole.

It would be funny, except we do that with missiles.

So how should we respond? That’s the challenge of our age, to somehow improve the rampant inequality that fosters this anger, the widespread lack of education that allows extremism to take root, and most of all, the profound absence of hope for any better option that makes someone pursue the type of indiscriminate violence that I believe is fundamentally against our human nature. We don’t want to kill, but if you saw only bleakness ahead for your children, what wouldn’t you do? And as if that isn’t difficult enough already, we will have to do it, for an extended period, even in the face of the ongoing attacks that are already growing. It seems an impossible goal, but given the world’s capacity to generate wealth, I bet we can do a step or ten-thousand better. Call me an optimist.

Growing up in Diyarbakir

But for starters? How about we stop making things worse? We stop blaming an entire religion for the actions of a few. (We can talk another time about the truly insane quantity of violence perpetrated by each of the religions of Abraham, but for now, do the Westboro Baptists represent Christianity?) We can acknowledge that Islam is only a religion, not a personality type, and certainly not a psychological dysfunction! Once we stop actively producing more terrorists, we can start to heal the deeper wounds that are producing them in the first place.

Not terrorists. Just people. Good people.

I’d like to give it four years. Just one presidential term. Instead of spending billions of dollars on bombs to kill Middle Easterners, we spend it helping those people who want to help themselves and each other. Pour ourselves into peace and improvement, instead of death and Halliburton. If you think there is no one left in the Middle East who wants peace, wants safety, wants a better world for their children? Then you’ve been watching the wrong TV.