As a seasoned traveler and expat, it's embarrassing to admit that I'm scared of flying. Despite the frequency with which I convince myself to do it, I have an irrational fear of plummeting from the sky (I don't understand physics and am convinced magic must be involved). Nevertheless, I have developed a certain amount of familiarity with the stresses and ritual of travel and life abroad. I know it can be dangerous (airplane turbulence notwithstanding), but can't anything? Still, I felt a jolt of panic in my stomach when news agencies announced a "Worldwide Travel Alert" from the U.S. State Department. Worldwide? Worldwide? I know there are frequently travel alerts of varying degrees of severity in conflict-ridden parts of the world, but worldwide?
Looking into it a little further, I found that these alerts are, in fact, not uncommon. Recently they've been issued every couple of years and twice in 2011. The State Department is also careful to say that this alert is not meant to discourage people from traveling, but rather to advise them to take extra caution and pay close attention to their environment, especially in crowded places. Seasoned travelers will agree that this is not bad advice even at the best of times.
Despite this alert, despite the fear it inevitably inspires in the populace, I can't help but think that the reaction to such announcements should be to travel more, not less. The cynical, perhaps ironic reason being that, in spite of the potential danger that causes the State Department to issue such alerts, more U.S. citizens die as a result of gun violence (or gun-related accidents) in the United States than from terrorism anywhere in the world. Just let that perspective sink in for a moment.
The positive, humanist (and frankly, better) reason to continue to travel and not fear the alert is that travel creates opportunities for connections and friendships with people from other countries and cultures, and friendships inspire communication, which leads to understanding. The best and maybe most effective way of fighting terrorism, fear, and enmity might just be by stepping over the political and cultural lines that we've drawn on maps. It might be easy for me to say, as I've yet to travel to anywhere especially risky, but as the State Department is currently warning us and recent events have shown, no place is entirely safe. I'm going anyway.
Don't let the instinctive fear that may have gripped you (as it did me) when you heard about the Worldwide Travel Alert prevent you from visiting other countries. To quote that mini-master of wisdom, Yoda: "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." While there might be those who would warn me not to put too much faith in the words of a fictional green puppet with poor grammar, perhaps much of the suffering in the world could be prevented if we stopped fearing people from other cultures and instead traveled to their countries and invited them to ours to learn that--even though they might enjoy eating pig intestines, greet one another by saying "Ahoj," or live in yurts--none of us are all that different.