Beverly Lynn
comfortably numb
- Joined
- Oct 17, 1999
- Messages
- 1,337
Saturday, September 29, 2001
We Owe It to Ourselves to Continue Traveling
by Arthur Frommer
This issue of our Daily Newsletter is published at a time when some are suggesting that we should reduce or even eliminate our travels, at least to other parts of the world. While all of us can understand the anxieties that lead to such advice, it is important that we should pause at this point to consider what travel means to us and to ponder its importance. In various writing both here and elsewhere, this Web site has repeatedly stated that travel--and especially international travel--has become an essential part of a civilized life.
That belief is confirmed by the decisions of countless millions of people in recent years to travel extensively and to international locations. We are the first generation in human history that now visits other continents as casually as people used to go to a neighboring village. Prior to the tragic events of September 11, it seemed in fact that the distinction between domestic and international travel was gradually being obliterated, that people were going to London as easily as they once went to Los Angeles.
In every gathering, again and again, you came upon this exhilarating new sense of what travel had become. You met friends at a party and they asked: should we vacation this winter in Florida--or in Australia? Should we go to New Orleans--or to Buenos Aires? Travel was making the world One. It had added a totally new dimension to our lives that no other people in any other century had enjoyed on a mass scale, but was now a precious legacy from courageous travel pioneers of the past.
The hard-won ability to explore remote and different parts of the world is too great a birthright to be lightly abandoned. It has become so enriching an experience that it should be hotly defended through our own personal decisions on how to spend our leisure time. And this tribute to the rewards of travel is no afterthought on our part, conceived after the events of the past two weeks, but a consistent message that we have advanced since the very start of this Internet publication.
In the spring of 1998, I wrote that "travel is part of a civilized life, far too important to be limited" by the obstacles we outlined in that issue. "Travel," I said in November of 1999, "is an important basic human right."
"Travel in our view is not simply a playful recreation...," I continued in January 2000. "It is a vital tool for understanding the world, acquiring greater awareness of other possibilities, communicating with those of other ideas or cultures. Though you may devour every journal of opinion and analysis, read endless political commentaries, follow every news show, there is nothing quite like the experience of actually traveling to other locations for the learning and insight it brings."
Earlier, in December 1999, I wrote that "Travel is the way we educate ourselves about the world, observe the realities of life in other places, gain the knowledge we need to make important judgments about new social measures and our own nation's foreign policy."
And beyond the greater understanding that travel brings to our decisions as citizens and our intellectual growth as people, it is also important to our inner life. "Once every winter," I wrote in the winter of 1998-99, "in an ideal world, all human beings would stand waist-deep in bathtub-warm Caribbean waters and cleanse their minds of petty anxieties and irritations. They would romp with their children, to laughs and shouts, on a soccer field of St. Maarten, or wiggle their hips to the reggae rhythms of a loudspeaker-blaring record store in Montego Bay. Once every winter, from a pier off the shores of Tahiti, Fiji or Maui, they would gaze lazily at small tropical fish and undersea coral. And they would stare transfixed at the great Mayan ruins of the Yucatan or fall into reveries while pondering the nighttime bowl of the universe from a moonlit beach of Bonaire."
If you share these views about the importance of travel, you will not remain stifled at home. You will not permit your life to be narrowed by close-minded fanatics. You will continue to pursue and enjoy a civilized life, of which travel is an essential part.
Respectfully, Arthur Frommer
We Owe It to Ourselves to Continue Traveling
by Arthur Frommer
This issue of our Daily Newsletter is published at a time when some are suggesting that we should reduce or even eliminate our travels, at least to other parts of the world. While all of us can understand the anxieties that lead to such advice, it is important that we should pause at this point to consider what travel means to us and to ponder its importance. In various writing both here and elsewhere, this Web site has repeatedly stated that travel--and especially international travel--has become an essential part of a civilized life.
That belief is confirmed by the decisions of countless millions of people in recent years to travel extensively and to international locations. We are the first generation in human history that now visits other continents as casually as people used to go to a neighboring village. Prior to the tragic events of September 11, it seemed in fact that the distinction between domestic and international travel was gradually being obliterated, that people were going to London as easily as they once went to Los Angeles.
In every gathering, again and again, you came upon this exhilarating new sense of what travel had become. You met friends at a party and they asked: should we vacation this winter in Florida--or in Australia? Should we go to New Orleans--or to Buenos Aires? Travel was making the world One. It had added a totally new dimension to our lives that no other people in any other century had enjoyed on a mass scale, but was now a precious legacy from courageous travel pioneers of the past.
The hard-won ability to explore remote and different parts of the world is too great a birthright to be lightly abandoned. It has become so enriching an experience that it should be hotly defended through our own personal decisions on how to spend our leisure time. And this tribute to the rewards of travel is no afterthought on our part, conceived after the events of the past two weeks, but a consistent message that we have advanced since the very start of this Internet publication.
In the spring of 1998, I wrote that "travel is part of a civilized life, far too important to be limited" by the obstacles we outlined in that issue. "Travel," I said in November of 1999, "is an important basic human right."
"Travel in our view is not simply a playful recreation...," I continued in January 2000. "It is a vital tool for understanding the world, acquiring greater awareness of other possibilities, communicating with those of other ideas or cultures. Though you may devour every journal of opinion and analysis, read endless political commentaries, follow every news show, there is nothing quite like the experience of actually traveling to other locations for the learning and insight it brings."
Earlier, in December 1999, I wrote that "Travel is the way we educate ourselves about the world, observe the realities of life in other places, gain the knowledge we need to make important judgments about new social measures and our own nation's foreign policy."
And beyond the greater understanding that travel brings to our decisions as citizens and our intellectual growth as people, it is also important to our inner life. "Once every winter," I wrote in the winter of 1998-99, "in an ideal world, all human beings would stand waist-deep in bathtub-warm Caribbean waters and cleanse their minds of petty anxieties and irritations. They would romp with their children, to laughs and shouts, on a soccer field of St. Maarten, or wiggle their hips to the reggae rhythms of a loudspeaker-blaring record store in Montego Bay. Once every winter, from a pier off the shores of Tahiti, Fiji or Maui, they would gaze lazily at small tropical fish and undersea coral. And they would stare transfixed at the great Mayan ruins of the Yucatan or fall into reveries while pondering the nighttime bowl of the universe from a moonlit beach of Bonaire."
If you share these views about the importance of travel, you will not remain stifled at home. You will not permit your life to be narrowed by close-minded fanatics. You will continue to pursue and enjoy a civilized life, of which travel is an essential part.
Respectfully, Arthur Frommer
