Staying Home Means Missing Chances to Help Mend a Hate-Torn World

Think of the long trip home.

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

Where should we be today?

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These lines from “Questions of Travel,” a poem by Elizabeth Bishop first published in 1956, have been running through my mind in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.

People who lost loved ones in these disasters haven’t the luxury of poetry now. For others stranded or rerouted by the nationwide closure of airports, there was no question: All they wanted was to go home.

Didn’t we all want to be home, in the one safe place where evil couldn’t reach us, when those hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, the ground southeast of Pittsburgh? Didn’t the knot in my stomach begin to ease when I learned, two days after the disasters, that I couldn’t fly to Athens because LAX was closed and my airline had canceled all flights to and from the U.S.?

Instead of swimming in the Aegean, I fertilized my potted plants and wept as the disasters unfolded on TV. I called everyone I knew on the East Coast to make sure they were safe. I put my suitcase back in the closet and went to sleep imagining the empty sky over the United States, where stars still twinkled but no planes flew.

In my Los Angeles cocoon, the thought of not being able to get on a plane and go somewhere if I wanted to rocked me and made me better understand the commentators’ point that terrorists also attacked many of the freedoms we hold dear. One of these, implied by the Declaration of Independence, is the right to travel, which we peripatetic Americans have enjoyed fully. As the smoke cleared, we saw that freedom of movement can easily be taken away, not just by grounded planes and airport closures--those are temporary--but by terrorism that makes us afraid to go anywhere.

I think of women I know who feel too vulnerable to sexual harassment and attack to travel widely and are sometimes even afraid to eat alone in a restaurant. This kind of personal fear is what we face now on a much larger scale. Airline travel will never be the same, and it’s possible that pleasure trips will decline in the wake of the tragedies. (Why risk your life for a Greek suntan?) The terrorists who chose commercial planes as their weapons wanted to hurt all of us. For them, frightening Americans so deeply that we never again want to fly must be a kind of bonus.

That anyone could hate America so much may seem inconceivable, but it is no surprise to people who travel. I often encounter anti-American sentiment on the road, and not just from poor and hopeless people in the Third World. A young Canadian backpacker I met in New Zealand once gave me a dressing-down for the 1991 Persian Gulf War, as if I’d ordered the bombardment of Baghdad from my home phone.

More poignant is my memory of a pedicab driver in Jaipur, India. I had spent the afternoon with him going from one shop to another in search of a bargain on a Rajasthani quilted bedspread. At one point, he turned and asked, “Why do you hate Muslims?”

Floored for a moment, I finally replied, “I don’t hate Muslims. I don’t hate anyone. I like you.” Then I showed him the paperback copy of the Koran I was carrying in my bag.

I hope he remembers the exchange as clearly as I do.

For me, the encounter underscores how travel can help knit together a hate-torn world. Meeting people from faraway places yields understanding, or at least an appreciation for how different they are, particularly if we approach them with respect. For this reason, I do whatever I can to dispel the ugly American stereotype by dressing and acting modestly when I’m away. I once saw a young tourist wearing a halter top in a Marrakech cafe with her Moroccan guide. Her attire was so disrespectful in this conservative country that I wanted to shriek at her.

We travelers also have the opportunity to see social conditions different from those in the U.S. close up and experience the zeitgeist of foreign countries. I love China, not just for the temples and palaces but because my trip there several years ago made me appreciate why a people ravaged by nearly 50 years of civil war can endure a repressive but stable communist regime.

Travel shakes you up, teaches you things, makes you reassess your assumptions. On the road, I read foreign newspapers whenever I get the chance because they remind me that not everyone in the world sees things the way Americans do.

Deeper still, travel is humbling. To find in Jordan or China that there are reasons for and ways of living with no reference to mine makes me a little less egocentric. And isn’t egocentrism--or ethnocentrism, on a global scale--at the heart of so much of the misunderstanding that breeds hate?

I hope the fear of terrorism will not keep us home, in safe but ignorant isolation. I hope we never lose the right to move freely around the world. In the end, it seems to me a right worth cherishing, mostly because going abroad makes me love home all the more and feel blessed to live in America, still the land of the free and brave--if we don’t succumb to fear.