“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
Travel might be needed more today than at any other time in our country's history.
While at first glance it might seem like social media has brought more people from diverse areas together, it seems to have resulted in more discord.
Rather than learning about each other, internet echo chambers divide us further. Celebrities, politicians and journalists, who should be the adults in the room, instead agitate, displaying less discipline than 3 year-olds throwing irrational temper tantrums and even advocating destruction.
I've never experienced so many people spewing hatred in the name of love.
And yet, when we get in the same room with people, we rediscover each other's humanity, even if we may disagree politically.
When traveling, politics fade away almost entirely.
We instead share wonderful new adventures that bond us together.
Encountering new cultures and walking through the streets of history, we learn to find new perspectives on what we believe.
People we'd never met previously become closer than our next door neighbors.
Friends and family members see each other in a new light, with new inside jokes and common frames of reference that will last a lifetime.
And when we return home, we continue to see the world anew.
"Ye must be born again."
---John 3: 7
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