Travel is fatal to prejudice

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” Mark Twain

Mark Twain makes a good point. When you travel you often are surprised by just how much we human beings are alike despite our differing ways of speaking and our differing styles of dress and our differing cultures.

Maya Angelou says “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.”

When I was young, I lived in several parts of the Seattle area that were literally all white.  I don’t recall ever meeting a single black person before I went to Junior High.  I didn’t actually meet the two [count ‘em –two] black kids that finally came to our school.  They were celebrities.  She was on the cheerleading team.  Her brother was just as well known.

As time went by, at various jobs, social get togethers and in my little travels around the West, I got to know quite a diversity of people.  And whether they were Hispanic or African American or Easterners [folks, from New York City who talk really fast or from New Jersey who are quite forceful in their way of speaking] or India Indians or Vietnamese or Japanese or Peruvian, I started realizing that for all of our differences, we are all just people. 

We have our superstitions and our fears.  We have our expectations and our goals.  We have love and we have hate. There is good and bad available within each of our hearts.  Just about no person is all good or all bad. 

I’m willing to make a few exceptions on the all bad ones.  There are a few humans I don’t think have much good in them. Fortunately, they are the exception in a vast sea of people that are pretty decent.

And I am certain that I haven’t met a single person who is all good.  Nope, not a single saint although they may have had others fooled.  I have met a few that think awfully highly of themselves and  I think they rank themselves a bit higher in goodness than is warranted.

I haven’t felt the need to respect everyone I have ever met.  Really, there are a some people I can just barely tolerate.  But I have tried very hard to remember that each one of us is only human. We have a little good and a little bad in all of us.  In my lifetime, I have found that to be so of all races and creeds and different religious or non-religious beliefs.

The Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Mormons, Buddhists, the New Age spiritulists and all the other religious folks I have met, along with the non-believers of all sorts, the various doubters, agnostics and atheists have been a mixed bag.  No one group has the only good there is in the world. Nor all the bad for that matter.

I have traveled throughout the West and been as far as Texas and little further. I have had the opportunity to meet many people by now.  And I find this Mark Twain quotation to be quite apt: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”