I don’t remember when I first started traveling on my own, but it was fairly early in life. I know that I was traveling on my own while a senior in high school, because I fondly remember solitary weekend commercial bus trips all over Luzon Island in the Philippines. My father and mother were often away on various business trips and I was left in the custody of one of their friends, a former guerrilla leader in the Philippines during the Second World War, who did not mind my absences as long as I did not miss any school days. Following graduation from high school, I attended Oregon State College for the better part of two years, during which time, I hitchhiked all over the Western United States and down into Mexico. I was a lousy student, but I was well-traveled. The Korean War came along, I joined the army and studied the Chinese language for a year. That took me to Korea, Japan, and Okinawa during which time my working day was filled with trying to figure out what various Chinese military units were trying to accomplish. After I got out of three years in the army, I went back to school for a bit, got my Masters, and then joined the Foreign Service. That continued my international travel for thirty years and also continued my interest in and concern with foreign affairs. After the foreign service, I continued to travel for decades to various places all over the world that I had not yet visited, including most notably, foot trails in every single national and state natural park West of the Rocky Mountains.
I compare my own life with the life experiences of my fellow American citizens and I understand why I am so out of step with my compatriots thinking. The average American’s travel experiences are severely limited in time and scope. I studied multiple foreign languages and tried mightily to understand foreign cultures that I was living in for extended periods of time. The average American has only read about them in school books and novels, seen pictures of them and watched TV shows about them. The average American has not lived in a third world economy, purchased meat hanging on a tree for dinner, dodged disputes that involved hostile armies shooting at each other, and tried to convince legions of foreigners that siding with us was better than with their other international options. I consider myself lucky beyond belief, but am frustrated that I can not pass along what I have learned to my compatriots who seem to be intently, nobly, falling on all of the wrong swords. The childish understanding of life that permeates American society today is, in my mind, the greatest danger that we face. From it stems the massive misapplication of resources and initiatives that fail to meet the challenges facing us.
I spent a lot of time in and working on Thailand. Decades. I was fluent in the language and I understood the power structure. My political analysis was consistently accurate and I was rewarded with rapid advancement in my professional life. The way that happened was through an enormous amount of focused work over a long period of time. At one point in my time in country, I was charged with helping introduce American Peace Corps volunteers into Thailand. The objective of the Peace Corps was for Americans to help Thai at village level improve their lives more quickly. In that, the Peace Corps failed miserably. The average American was unable to breach the cultural divide sufficiently to help his or her counterpart. What happened more often was that the Thai counterpart taught the American a little bit about life in a less developed society. The principal value of the effort was the education that it provided Americans, not the other way around. There were Thai that were much better positioned to help their country develop than the vast majority of naive American volunteers that arrived in country.
The Peace Corps helped mightily to open my eyes as to the intellectual and cultural gulf that exists between peoples and the way in which the resultant differences can be exploited by contrarians and evil individuals. I eventually came to understand that I can not expect someone who has a different life experience to understand the situation the same way that I do. I also understand that I am not going to be able to make a difference. The problem is too all-encompassing for me to be able to do more than understand what is happening. Those that were conditioned by life differently than was I, will inevitably read things differently than do I. Because they are in the vast majority, they will prevail. Given the existence of nuclear weapons, that is way too bad.
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