Tourist
Noun: Someone who deliberately travels far from home in order to complain about how things are not exactly like they are in the place they left.
Libertarians, My Libertarians!
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas -- unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
In all honesty, in my travels I was often disappointed that too many of the things from home were present in foreign lands (I avoided those like the plague).
ReplyDeleteI was always the guy that went out to taste the regional cuisine in dodgy venues, I was the guy that paid my taxi driver a good buck to give me the inside-view tour (I would also keep a good driver on retainer), and I always recognized that I was a foreigner in their land.
I guess that there is quite a difference between a tourist and a traveler... a traveler treats each person and each day as it comes without presupposition or expectation, no matter where he is. He enjoys the possibility of experiencing something completely foreign and unknown to him. He relinquishes himself to the strange world that surrounds him rather than seek solace in the sameness of his own world.
I certainly have a great deal to learn from life, but life (in my opinion) is not to seek the seclusion of your own beliefs and culture, it is the "reckless abandon" to experience a life different from your own. Only then do you see the common threads that bind us all.
I am not talking about politics, economics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc; I am talking about just being an everyday, ordinary human. Surprisingly, many people find it difficult to do that.