Richard Turen
Since we last spoke there has been a bit of domestic news for us to digest -- or rather regurgitate. The outcome and aftermath of our election has exposed some of the unfortunate realities of our nation and the very deep divisions within it.
About 35% of our country now appears to subscribe to any number of online conspiracy theories, and we know that 64% of our potential clients turn to online sources for news of the world.
Planning worldwide travel for some of these folks would be challenging.
That is, if they travel at all. I say that for economic rather than political reasons. In our society, the top 636 families now have more financial assets than the bottom 50% of the population. The bottom half of society, 160 million strong, are not, for the most part, traveling overseas. They are having a hard time making it. They don't own stocks. They don't have a travel savings account. The Dow Jones is irrelevant in their lives.
Unfortunately, some of our citizens who most need to travel abroad will never have the opportunity beyond, perhaps, military service. This saddens me because I think there is a dangerous misperception that travel addresses: The belief that everything about us as a country is the envy of the world.
That may have once been true in a general sense, but there has always been much that Americans could learn from the rest of the world.
Many years ago, in another lifetime, I was the headmaster of a private American boarding school in a village in the Tuscan hills just outside Florence.
The students arrived from America each year, and we tried to give them two days of gentle acclimation and rest. But early on the third morning, we woke them all up and explained we would be leaving for a little day trip.
We'd take them to Zurich. I can still remember the shock of those teens as they wandered the streets of the city, explored the parks, had locals describe how things worked in Swiss society, rode the pollution-free public transportation and shopped at a store with no employees. They had never imagined that a place could be "this advanced, this clean, this safe."
We played it all up because this was designed to be a shock-and-awe educational experience. I wanted them to be open to the idea that some places do some things better than we do.
I suppose a proper shrink could connect what I try to do now with those days in the 1970s. I am still aiming for shock and awe. I still want every member of our society to travel -- not just the rich and famous. It is the only way to overcome our self-generated, social media-enhanced ignorance about the rest of the world.
One of the things that always troubled me about our last president was my sense that he hated travel for nonbusiness purposes. I could never find any examples of a Trump family vacation outside our borders. I cannot recall anything he said or did that could be interpreted as encouraging us to see a bit of this planet we share with others.
Perhaps our planning and our guide services need to pay closer attention to the question of how things really work in a destination. It would be wonderful if more of our clients returned home with a few "suggested solutions" for our society packed away among the souvenirs in their luggage.