Tanzania. May 2001

All these years of Discreet Traveling, yet I've never posted about this trip. I think because it's too big to write about in blog form. A town in northern Tanzania gave its name to my first novel, Arusha, and crucial scenes were set there. Arusha is about a woman whose life changes, and while those changes don't begin in East Africa, she's definitely a different person once she returns from there.

There are all the other places I've traveled or hope to travel in my life, and then there's Tanzania. It was the most amazing trip I've ever experienced or ever expect to have.

If we're fortunate, each of us has that one place that was perfectly amazing. If you went on a similar trip to mine, it might not be your #1; it is not objective. When I say that nowhere I've been could even measure on the same scale as Tanzania, that is not to take anything away from, say, the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia. Who knows, if I had gone to the Great Barrier Reef when I was 28 and had never visited the southern hemisphere before, that might be the trip by which my mind was most comprehensively blown.

But I didn't and that is why, when I write about Tanzania, I'm not thinking in terms of anecdotes or how hilarious it was when we had to go in and chase off that gigantic spider in my sister's room. I am thinking of impressions, of how different I felt when I went there, and when I returned to Canada.

It's become an important disclaimer in travel writing now "not to be Eat, Pray, Love." Somewhat unfairly to a book that sold very well (and which I remember enjoying at the time), this disclaimer has to do with how wrong it is to be a privileged Westerner projecting one's own needs or inadequacies onto people who live in the developing world. That type of writing, and indeed traveling, takes away from the authentic lives of the people who live in developing countries, and makes travel a selfish experience that is all about us.

Well...yes. We are privileged if we can freely travel to other countries, and it's insensitive if we don't acknowledge that people there have lives of their own, lives we can never fully understand. Some Western tourists clearly don't understand or appreciate this privilege. I'm not just talking about rich Americans who think the thoughtless slaughter of wildlife is a fun way to visit Africa (I'm looking at you, Trump Jr.), but the Canadian whose comments I read on a travel site the other day. She didn't understand why Tanzanians don't pay nearly the same prices as foreign visitors do at Tanzania's national parks, and felt that she had been ripped off. That doesn't show much awareness of the relative wealth of Tanzanians and people who can afford to travel there. Besides, if there were no money in conserving nature, could we really blame local people for farming on that land instead, or otherwise making use of it? We might not be "rich" in our countries back home, but we certainly are from the perspective of most people we meet in the developing world.

As we are learning, being aware of privilege can go a long way. There may not be much I can personally do about the structural inequality in the world, but if I open my eyes and truly try to learn when I'm abroad, I may appreciate its existence in a way that's hard to do sitting at home. Whether I go on to try and do something positive about it is up to me, of course.

But I also find traveling one of the great joys of life and if there is beauty and magnificence in the world, and people working hard to preserve it, then that is a good thing. I want to be there and appreciate it. Having done so, I hope it has affected me personally--that I've learned something and won't see the world in quite the same way as I did before. I don't think it's very responsible not to learn.

Ever since I left Tanzania, I have wanted to go back. I hope when I do that I have more knowledge of and appreciation for Tanzanians, their varied ways of life, and how hard the people work who make visitors' experiences possible. But I do not hope ever to see anything as amazing as a young lion trotting along beside our safari vehicle.

Photographs by P. J. Radley

And I know I won't have what turned out to be one of the blessed advantages on that trip fifteen years ago: a simple film camera. The 35-mm camera with which (a better photographer than I) took most of our pictures did not even have a zoom lens. That means that when I look at the pictures now, I know exactly how far away that lion was--even the hunting female with redeye, just that close.

Wherever you go in this world, I hope you have incredible, eye-opening encounters with nature and with people. And I hope you appreciate them deeply. It is a blessing.

Blazing the track

I’ve hesitated to write on this subject, because the ignorance and bitter feelings being expressed take away from the glory of athletic competition. But I feel I have to express my pride in Caster Semenya, who carried South Africa’s flag at the closing ceremony of the Rio Olympics, and who won the women’s 800m race on Saturday night.

For those who don’t know the background, Caster Semenya’s career has been dogged by years of humiliation at the hands of the International Association of Athletics Federations. Not because she’s a doper, but because she isn’t. Semenya is believed to have, naturally, hyperandrogenism, which includes a higher testosterone level than most women. As a result, she has been excluded from competitions and forced to take testosterone-lowering medication to inhibit her performance—even though no less than the American Medical Association has concluded that no one factor can make the difference for an elite athlete.

Sex and gender are complicated and not as binary as we were brought up to believe. The truth is, though, that Caster Semenya is not the only woman like this, even at these Games. In fact the appeal to the IAAF’s ruling that allowed them, once again, to compete was not brought by Semenya, but by an Indian runner named Dutee Chand. Caster Semenya has been humiliated publicly for years to a degree that no other athlete has, for two reasons: 1. She is a woman with a female partner who doesn’t try to look or sound as feminine as other people think she should, and 2. She wins.

These points are important. Lots of women have known a taste of what Semenya has gone through, though not on a spectacular international stage. Because our voices were deeper, or our presentation less feminine, than other women expected, we have been subjected to a thousand everyday gender shamings. We have been stopped at bathroom doors, whether or not we were transgender. If we are athletes, we have been told “Be a man, you try hard enough” or ridiculed in general for our physical efforts and trying to compete. If we actually are lesbian, we have of course been bashed for that too.

There were a record number of openly queer athletes at these Olympic Games, many of them gay or bisexual women, and there were plenty of slurs and shouting against them. But sexism and homophobia are not new in women’s sports. It was not until the 1980s that women were even allowed to run long distances at the Olympics, and we’ve all read about the first woman to run the Boston Marathon and attempts to manhandle her off the course.

Many people have heard about Semenya and may be sympathetic to what I’ve written above, but still have this nagging sense that there is something unfair about it. Of course an athlete is the product of her training and coaching as well as the body she was born with, but what about the other athletes? Isn’t it unfair to include a woman with more testosterone in her body than other women in the race, even though she comes by that level naturally?

Competition is unfair. It’s unfair that no matter how hard I trained, I could never beat Caster Semenya or any other Olympian on the track. I could train hard and receive good coaching, but I was not born with the body, the athletic gifts, that every single one of those competitors also has. Some have rare features, such as unusually long arms. In this case, a swimmer like Michael Phelps is generally admired for his magnificence, not persecuted as a freak.

A lot of things go into making an Olympic champion. Some an individual is born with and others involve hard work. No one feature can predict a gold medal—if it could, wouldn’t Dutee Chand have won her event? Yet she didn’t even make the final, crashing out of her heat. Clearly, there’s more than testosterone at work here.

A lot more. Think of the men’s 10,000m race, which only one person from the western hemisphere has ever won (Billy Mills, a Native American Indian, in 1964). Is this event less exciting because we fully expect someone from the eastern hemisphere to win it? Should we exclude such men from the race, or make them run separately, or take hormones to bring their speeds down?

How about Usain Bolt’s astonishing triple wins at the 100m, 200m and relay distances? They were astonishing, but not because we tuned in expecting someone else to win. We were astounded not by suspense over the outcome, but by Bolt’s magnificent gifts. He was the greatest on the track.

Would we rather Bolt take performance-diminishing drugs, so others had a chance to catch him? How about a special race for supermen only, leaving ordinary mortals to contest the sprints? Or let’s give Bolt’s gold medal in the 100m to the silver medalist, Justin Gatlin, who has been a known drug cheat.

It’s ridiculous. Bolt is the best thing to happen to track and field in years, because he runs faster than anybody else, in the body God gave him.

The woman who won the gold medal to Caster Semenya’s silver in the 2012 Olympics has since been disqualified for doping. Yet some in international athletics would like to force women like Semenya to reverse-dope (some have even undergone mutilation, an obscenity). Let’s leave aside human rights and fairness for a second, and ask this: Would it really be better for the sport if some women were forced to run more slowly than they can, in order to give other women a chance? Could anything be more demeaning to the competition? Don’t people watch the Games to see the very best on earth?

Years ago Kurt Vonnegut wrote a short story entitled “Harrison Bergeron.” In the world of that story, only people with severe speech impediments were permitted to speak on television. People who were deemed good-looking were required to wear clown noses, and especially fit people forced to weight their bodies down with shackles. All this made people “equal” so that no one would feel inadequate compared with an unusually gifted person. Vonnegut’s satire is obvious. But if world-class competition is reduced to such handicapping, don’t expect anybody to watch with pride.

As for Caster Semenya, she has proven to have more of that than most of the rest of us, too—pride and grace. “Be happy in front of your haters,” she posted last week; “it kills them.”

"Semenya didn't just win the gold medal in the women 800 metres final," writes Andrew Webster. "She won for every person who has ever been told they are different, they're not normal, that they should be ashamed of who they are."

Writing the future

A few years ago, I published a novel called The Trees in the Field, whose hero is a Republican woman in Congress. It begins: "Every United States senator looks in the mirror and sees a future president. Raybelle McKeehan had been seeing that future president since she was ten years old."

http://www.bellabooks.com/9781594932809-prod.html

I chose that age deliberately, because when I was ten, I thought I could be president of the United States. 

Last week for the first time, a major U.S. political party nominated a woman for president. But this isn't about her. It's about some of the women who weren't talked about at the Democratic National Convention, and about how what is imagined becomes what is real.

In 1981-82, I had a couple of favorite books. They weren't my books; they belonged to my classroom in Carter County, Tennessee. One was the Arrow Book of Presidents. It had two or three pages about each of, at that time, thirty-nine men who had served as President of the U.S. I already liked history, and found that I was also interested in politics. In particular, I was interested in the presidency, a unique role that was at once "leader of the free world" and head of state of my country.

I learned the full names of all the presidents by heart. It's my party trick. At this year's Democratic convention, when the Jumbotron showed the faces of forty-three white men and one African-American man who have served as president, I was mouthing each name.

Then the Jumbotron showed a glass ceiling breaking. Here's another thing I remember about the Arrow Book. The back page listed the constitutional requirements to be president: thirty-five years old, a resident of the United States, a U.S. citizen from birth. "A man or woman," the book said, who met these three requirements could become president.

There it was. The Constitution didn't say it had to be a man. I could see in the Arrow Book that every president so far had been a man, but that didn't mean it had to be so forever. 

In the 1970s, books had begun to be published depicting a rainbow, Sesame Street kind of world, and these books had made it even to my school. They would illustrate "police officer," for example, with a picture of a black woman. To the adults around me--male and female--this was propaganda. "Why does it always have to be a black woman?" I would hear, even though--or perhaps because--none of us had ever seen a black woman fulfill this role in real life.

The presidency did not seem remarkable to me in this way. I had never seen anyone other than a white man preach, either, or serve at the communion table in church. I had never seen a female principal, although all of my teachers were women. I had never seen a female doctor, or a female police officer, let alone a black one. Yet in black and white--in books--it was possible.

My other favorite book of the time was They Led the Way. It also contained a few pages each about a number of people--in this case, a dozen or so American women whose names are still not well known. Anne Hutchinson, one of those banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony because their religious convictions clashed with the Puritans'. Carrie Chapman Catt, whose mother explained that only Carrie’s father could vote, and who decided to do something about that. And a woman called Victoria Woodhull, who in 1872 ran for president of the United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Woodhull

When I shared these stories, I heard remarks about these women too. Anne Hutchinson didn't just discuss her minister's sermons or say American Indians should not be slaves. As for Victoria Woodhull, she wasn't a serious candidate; she could never have really become president. The adults in my life didn't say that Hutchinson challenged the subordination of women, or that Woodhull advocated "free love," but there was obviously something wrong with each of them.

Neither book mentioned that one hundred years after Victoria Woodhull, Shirley Chisholm ran for the Democratic presidential nomination. She was the first black person to run for a major party's nomination for president, although not the first woman (Margaret Chase Smith ran as a Republican in 1964). Of course, she didn't get it. If black women in picture books were controversial in the 1970s, try imagining one as president! 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Chisholm

She was succeeded as Secretary of the House Democratic Caucus by a representative named Geraldine Ferraro. Chisholm herself betrayed her excessive optimism by predicting "We will have a woman president before the end of the century." It hasn't happened yet. But today her party, at least, could not function without black women, let alone win elections. When the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee resigned at the last moment, Donna Brazile stepped in as interim chairman. This year's convention was chaired by Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio, and the CEO of the convention, as in 2008, was Washington, D.C.'s Reverend Leah Daughtry. 

If you want to know why a woman is this year's Democratic nominee, rather than the man who got almost as many primary votes as the Republican candidate, look at black women. Her performance with them was equal to Bernie Sanders's with voters under the age of twenty-five, and African-American women are a much larger percentage of the Democratic electorate.

After I was ten I began to learn more about sexism, and how women were not deemed competent to do a man's job. I saw what happened to the man who ran with a female vice presidential candidate in the 1984 election. Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro won only one state plus D.C., and it sounded to me as if this was all you could expect with such a fringe idea as nominating a woman. No one exactly said it, but like Victoria Woodhull, she couldn't be taken seriously.

By the time I was in high school, I realized that a female prime minister had been leading Britain for years. More and more countries around the world were electing female leaders, but clearly this hadn't made misogyny disappear. My working life brought an emphatic end to the illusion that women, even now, were treated equally. Before I ever heard of Barack Obama, I remember declaring that a black man was more likely to become president than a woman (though both seemed unlikely), and that if a woman ever was elected, I would eat my hat.

I am telling this story to illustrate that what is incredible to a forty-three-year-old woman was easily imagined at ten. We do not begin our lives feeling that some people have more worth than others. Snide remarks teach us that feeling, and then experience does the rest.

I was in the womb when George McGovern, instead of Shirley Chisholm, ran for president. McGovern's coalition of most people of color (a higher proportion of their votes than Obama got in 2012), together with radicals like gay activists, and the occasional college-educated white voter like my parents, also lost forty-nine states. But America has changed so much that this year, that could be a winning coalition.

I was born the week of Nixon's obscenely nicknamed "Christmas bombings," the biggest bombing campaign of the Vietnam war. My earliest memory is watching the U.S. bicentennial celebrations on TV, when Ford was president. I saw President Carter in person when he was campaigning for reelection in 1980. I saw Bill and Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire when Bill was running in the Democratic primary.

I was studying in England when Bill Clinton won election and reelection to the presidency. By the time of Bush v. Gore in 2000, I had emigrated to Canada. But I was back, on the National Mall in Washington, when the first African-American president--a man who had beaten Hillary Clinton--was inaugurated in 2009.

The four-yearly intervals of the presidency have marked my life, even far from the United States. I haven't had to eat my hat yet. But I do know that writing about things in books can fire the imagination of readers, and perhaps help little girls' dreams come true.

An open letter to Hillary Rodham Clinton

Author's note: Although this blog is about my travels, living outside the U.S. since 2000 means being asked about that country and its president. More often than I would like. So I've chosen this forum to share thoughts.

Dear Mrs. Clinton,

I know you sign your e-mails to me "Hillary" but we both know those aren't really written by you, so please accept the formality. The way things have been going in this election campaign, to err on the side of respect is no vice.

I'm on Bernie Sanders's e-mail list too. In fact, I voted for him during the primary. I mention that now because I want you to know where I'm coming from. I have not been an uncritical fan of yours, but I listen to what you have to say, and I feel that I gave you a fair chance.

I'm not one of those young student voters, but I was the first time I saw you, with your husband in New Hampshire in 1992. He was running for president, and I hadn't heard of you before you were First Lady of Arkansas. I have to say, I didn't warm to either you or Mr. Clinton at first. But, by the time the general election rolled around I was glad to vote for him, and I remember you trying hard to accomplish something on health care during his administration. It failed--tragically--and part of me thought then that both of you should have gone down fighting for the most important thing we elected him for.

But, the 1990s were a different time. The number of jobs increased, and the markets were going up and up and up--it's no wonder Mr. Clinton made some of the decisions he did about welfare and trade deals. A lot of Americans were more optimistic in those days. And I certainly would never excoriate you, as opposed to your husband, for things he did wrong in your personal life. Public humiliation in front of the entire world is a high enough price to pay.

We've been through a lot since 2000--you, and I, and America. I left the country for reasons that did not change until the Supreme Court decision in United States v. Windsor a couple years ago. By that time, I'd long since become a Canadian and made a life for myself somewhere else. But I wasn't one of those people who claim they're going to run away to Canada if someone gets elected they don't like. I still have a stake in America, as do other Canadians and, in fact, the rest of the world.

One of your most disarming moments in this long campaign was when you said, in the Univision debate, "I am not a natural politician, in case you haven.'t noticed, like my husband or President Obama." I felt for you then, Mrs. Clinton, because it made you human to me. So often, your answers are so measured and careful, and believe me, I understand why that is. The "vast right-wing conspiracy" may not have been to blame for your husband's problems, but people certainly have had it in for you. You've learned from long experience to weigh your words carefully whenever you open your mouth, and you know that issues are usually more nuanced and complex than simply "yes" or "no."

The problem is that right now, we are in a place that we have never been before. You went into the 2008 campaign (when I voted for you, by the way) with the same broad economic and policy views shared by Mr. Clinton, Mr. Obama, and indeed Republican presidents before you. Up until 2008, I guess they still made sense, especially in the world in which you move. The problem is that a lot has gone down since then and a lot of people are hurting in a way that you may not have been aware of.

Some of them, no doubt, have the kind of racial resentment that your Republican opponent has proven so adept at stirring up. But others do not. That's why you had such a hard time putting away your surprising opponent for the Democratic nomination--an independent senator whose state, age, and self-described socialist views the media never get tired of making fun of. They have been on your side from Day One (remember that expression from eight years ago?) yet they haven't completely been able to crush coverage of, and enthusiasm for, Mr. Sanders. In my opinion, he has been good for the Democratic party--even, dare I say it, good for you. He has forced you and the rest of the Democrats to deal with a bunch of issues that were not important during Mr. Clinton's presidency, but are very important to many Americans today, especially those who don't have the memories of the 1990s that you and I have.

So now you've survived that, and you are facing the ugliest thing that has happened to U.S. politics since George Wallace walked out of the Democratic party a generation ago. Since the "police riot" of chaos and violence in Chicago in 1968. Only at least that year, the violence didn't erupt until the Democratic convention in the summer. This time, it's been going on all year.

You may not be a natural politician, Mrs. Clinton, but you know what we are all up against is not the usual four-yearly opponent. I didn't want Mitt Romney or John McCain to be president, but they were honorable men, with whom you could disagree in what was once called civil discourse. Heaven knows what's happened to John McCain now, but you remember that after Mr. Obama had gotten the nomination in 2008 and was starting to get hit with the lies and disrespect that have plagued his administration, Mr. McCain spoke up for that civil discourse and his own honorable opponent. "He's a decent person...no, ma'am, he's a decent family man and citizen."

Now, however, we have Mr. Trump. You know him--personally--and you also know that he has found a way to tap that racial resentment, that hurt. By saying just enough truth to convince people (never more), Mr. Trump has won voters to his side. You have got to win more voters, in more states, than he does.

Of course you know this is your task. And many of your supporters--opponents, even--may think this is a good position to be in, that you can't flub it up. With the greatest respect, Mrs. Clinton, I think that you can. I don't, God forbid, think that you will, but we must all recognize the possibility of failure. If we don't, failure will come to you.

Hence, my unsolicited advice to you, as a voter, not an expert of any kind. I like you, Mrs. Clinton. I won't say I've always supported you, and goodness knows you've driven me up the wall plenty of times, but we are on the same side. So are most Democratic voters, regardless of whom they voted for in the primaries. So are a lot of Republicans. In fact you probably would rather disclaim some of the people who've supported you, but as a woman called out to Adlai Stevenson in the apocryphal campaign story, "Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!"

"That's not enough, madam, we need a majority!"

So here's how you're going to get that majority, Mrs. Clinton--though you're not a natural politician, though you're held to a different--some would say impossible--standard because you are a woman, though you've had to evolve on numerous issues, though the economic consensus to which you and Mr. Obama and Mr. Clinton held is not holding water anymore and it's awkward for you to adjust to that.

1. Say it like you mean it. I know you've gotten better at this, but my gosh, sometimes I still cringe. We know Benghazi is a made-up scandal. We know you testified for eleven hours and Congress got nothing on you. So when Jorge Ramos asks did you lie, please start your answer with No. Then you can explain the context and express your feelings for the Benghazi families.When asked if you lie--and when given the opportunity to lie--ever, just say no. 

Does that remind you of Nancy Reagan? Sorry to bring that up again. I know you apologized and, while I don't feel entitled to accept your apology on behalf of all gay people, I get that you misspoke. To paraphrase a friend of mine, I'm guessing that when asked to say something nice about the Reagans, you may have panicked a little bit. In the same circumstances, I'd probably have to make something up too. 

2. Don't take your voters for granted. You've already figured out that African-Americans don't owe you their vote just because you're named Clinton. Queers don't owe you their vote just because you're a Democrat. Yes, I said queer. Get used to it, as we said before your husband was president (the first we'd ever had who could pronounce the words gay and lesbian). We've all come a long way from Little Rock, Mrs. Clinton. Don't blow it.

3. Represent us. All of us--America. You and Mr. Sanders have run such a high-class campaign, but this is the fight of your life. It's the fight of our lives. Literally. Thanks to executive overreach by every recent president including Mr. Obama and Mr. Clinton, the office you're running for is more powerful than any position in the world should be. And we have someone reaching for it who would destroy freedom of speech, tighten libel laws, threaten lawsuits or punishment to those who disagree with him, deport millions (or, if he can't prove their illegality, make it up), and close the borders to an entire religion. A man who speaks loathsomely of women and for whom no level of rhetoric is too low, or too inflammatory, to stoop to. A man who pines for "the good old days" before "political correctness"--where political correctness means "not punching black people in the face."

This is not a Republican opponent, Mrs. Clinton. This is an opponent of the republic itself.

Like it or hate it, the President of the United States is both our head of government and the head of state of our country. He represents it to us and to the world, like the Queen. The position you are in, Mrs. Clinton, is that you have to represent the country before you are even elected to the office. You have to start acting like our president right now.

Not that many voters care what the rest of the world thinks, but we are horrified by what America has become even before the election. People who normally take minimal interest in politics find it hard to believe that someone so obviously (to a European) a right-wing nationalist is in danger of becoming the President of the United States. Living outside America, Mrs. Clinton, I am asked every day about Mr. Trump and what will happen if he gets where he wants to go.

This is not just about Supreme Court nominations, or same-sex marriage, or Obama-/Hillary-/Romneycare. As important as those and many other issues are, there is really only one issue in 2016. Is the U.S.A. going to continue to be the republic for which the flag stands, "one nation," or is it going to fracture into something else?

I mentioned the 1960s before, but I think something even greater than the 1960s is at hand. Try the 1860s. This country is in danger of splitting as it did during the Civil War, and along the same lines. You have never claimed to be Abraham Lincoln, Mrs. Clinton, but right now the best the party of Lincoln has come up with is your opponent, Mr. Trump. If President Lincoln were here, he would no doubt be surprised to see a "little lady" running to be his successor. But I believe if he, or any responsible Republican or Democrat of the past, thought that the alternative was a vulgar misogynist who whips crowds into a fury with the rhetoric of hate groups, Mr. Lincoln would vote for you.

Our opponents will laugh us to scorn. Hillary Clinton! We've never liked her! I know that hurts your feelings; as you reminded us, you're a human being too. I'm not saying you're Lincoln. But you are--forgive me--the little Dutch boy whose finger is plugging this particular dike, and if you can't get it done, we're all going to be under water for a long time to come.

We are the U.S. citizens whom you said you would always support, whether we supported you or not. We are people who never imagined America could elect a woman president, and people who weren't sure that you were that woman. We are registered in different parties and we are independents. We live in many countries and look to see what the United States will do. We all know who Hillary Clinton is, that you visited more countries than any other Secretary of State, that you were in the Situation Room when they went for Osama bin Laden--all of that. Millions and millions of us are hoping, even praying, that you rise above your human weaknesses and get this done for us.

You are a Christian and talk about praying daily, but I've never heard anyone say of you that you're anointed by God to seek and obtain the presidency. For all that, I believe this is your moment. I very much doubt that you would have chosen these exact circumstances and no one is more surprised than I that we are in them, but here we are. 

If I may conclude with an anecdote you may know from British history. Before World War II, Arthur Greenwood became the deputy leader of the opposition Labour Party under Clement Attlee. On the 2nd of September 1939, acting for an absent Attlee, he was called to respond to Conservative Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's ambivalent speech on whether Britain would aid Poland. He was interrupted by an angry Conservative backbencher, Leo Amery, who exclaimed "Speak for England, Arthur!" Arthur Greenwood proceeded to give the speech of his life, denouncing Mr. Chamberlain's appeasement and beginning the unification of Britain against the greatest enemy the Allies ever faced.

Speak for America, Hillary.

Yours sincerely,

J. E. Knowles

X

I read an article recently that got me thinking about something I rarely identify with: my generation. It's a spirited call to action, to which this is a complement. If you don't have time to read both articles, read Matthew Hennessey's.

I have friends across a range of ages and have always thought that was important, so even when “Generation X” was a popular term, I didn’t really submit to it. But age has been prominent this year in the U.S.A., more than race or ethnicity. The age of Bernie Sanders seems to be remarked upon as often as the remarkable fact that the U.S., at this late date, has yet to elect a woman president. What I never hear mentioned is that Hillary Clinton, several years younger than Senator Sanders, is the same age as our oldest president (the one I grew up with, Reagan.)

All of this has made me realize that the people least noticed and talked to/about in all of this are the generation doing most of the work and kid-raising happening today—mine. So I want to sit down in a [virtual] room with the Baby Boomers and the “millennials” and knock their heads together sort this out. I’m addressing this not just to Democrats, because one of the problems is that lots of Americans (including, until recently, Sanders) identify as independents. That’s not actually a problem, of course, unless your party is more important than your country. If it’s not (I’m looking at you, Republicans), read on.

The Sanders campaign has drawn the focus of this talking past each other, because its candidate’s age contrasts with the age of some of his strongest supporters. The Millennials are by no means all of his voters, but what Baby Boomers (the core of Clinton’s and Trump’s support) can’t get past is that these young people are voting for someone so old, when they themselves know nothing! They don’t remember First Lady Hillary Clinton. They don’t appreciate what happened in the 1990s.

Well, I do. And because I am in the middle, I can see farther than either of you.

Further into both the past and future. Unlike my youngest compatriots, I know members of the Greatest Generation—my grandparents’. I vividly remember people who lived through the Second World War. I have met Holocaust survivors on numerous occasions, and I will never forget them. The 1940s are receding into history, but still part of my century.

But I can also see further into the future than perhaps those born in the 1940s can. And that’s important, because the next President of the United States is almost certain to come, once again, from that decade. The presidency, and voters for the presidency, skew overwhelmingly Baby Boomer. By sheer size, the Baby Boomer generation has had overwhelming influence at every stage of their lives, and that continues. But as you guys retire, your grandchildren’s generation is going to need mine.

The week I graduated from college (=university), 1994. Reality Bites was in theatres.

 Most people my age are too busy. We’ve had presidents from your generation since 1992. That was when George Bush, a World War II veteran, gave way to Bill Clinton, the first Baby Boomer president. Back then, Bill was the draft dodging, pot smoking guy in his forties. Remember that? Millennials don’t remember when Bill and Hillary Clinton were the young First Family, but I do. You don’t have to remind me.

I get you, Baby Boomers. I’ve known of Bernie Sanders since before the Millennials were born. You were the original “never trust anyone over thirty” protesters, and now you see people under thirty voting for someone older than you and you don’t understand it. My gosh, are they even Democrats? The answer to that depends on your response now. They represent either the future of your party or its end.

I’m Ted Cruz’s age, so I remember the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. But these young people don’t. What they remember is capitalism never having worked for them in their entire lives.

And as for you, young people…of course I’m frustrated that you don’t like “feminism” or seem to appreciate all that your mothers’ generation went through, not to mention my mother’s. I’m a ‘70s-born lesbian, for Pete’s sake. But you are also the world that previous generations fought for. We wanted a generation that takes environmental science and homosexuality for granted, and thinks barring transgender people from bathrooms is stupid. We worked so that you would think electing a woman is no big deal. We are the generation that changed minds over this.

Every generation gets its turn to challenge what went before and try to do better. The Baby Boomers did this on a seismic scale, and gave us the revolutions of the 1960s. Women’s rights and gay rights come from that generation. Well done.

But this is your last chance. You get one more chance to run this country instead of running it into the ground. Many people, not just young people, have lost all confidence in the system even functioning, let alone fairly. You can continue to dismiss and alienate them, like your parents’ generation once did you, or you can listen to your children.

Both older and younger people need to listen to us for once. We’re the only ones who can understand you both.

Safe travels

The first book that inspired me to travel internationally was my favorite novel, Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev. In it, Asher Lev's mother saw first her husband and then her son off on many trips. Before leaving them at the airport, she would always say, "Have a safe journey." And off the man would walk to his plane, a copy of The New York Times under his arm.

That was my dream--to be that politically aware, global traveler. But I always remembered Mrs. Lev's unease, and the sendoff our loved ones give us when we travel: "Have a safe journey."

Given that every aspect of a journey is not actually within our control, how do we do that? What is the best approach to take to ensure a safe and enjoyable trip?

You won't be surprised to find that I think attitude is the key. Attitude and preparation. Both are necessary to get the most out of our travels as well as for safety, but as the saying goes, "safety first."

Start with attitude. Many of the concerns we, or our families and friends, start off with at home are based on fear, and the fact that news in general tends to focus on negative things. For example, at the moment I happen to live in the London area. From time to time, I hear things said on the news, usually by people in other countries, about how dangerous English cities are or how London in particular has some kind of problem. Because I actually live here, and some of the people I know best are serving or former police officers, I know how wildly inaccurate these statements are, and that the people making them literally have no idea what they are talking about. But if I'd never been to London, and all I knew was what I saw on TV, I might take the news at face value. The point is that news in general focuses on the sensational and the bad, so leaving you with a highly skewed impression of other parts of the world.

If you're a traveler or planning an overseas trip, you probably already have an adventurous attitude, but it still makes sense to be prepared before you travel. One way is to read up on the place you are going--not exclusively travel advisories or news (though of course those are worth taking into consideration), but from travel guides and forums online. People who have recently traveled to an area are usually best placed to advise you. Get an idea of where is generally a good place to visit vs. areas of a city or country you should definitely avoid.

If you're leaving your home behind temporarily unoccupied, you've probably already thought about things like having your mail stopped and taking precautions so that your home does not look empty. Lights that go on at a certain time or, best of all, having a friend or neighbour keep an eye on the place are good ideas. If you're gone for an extended period and have a housesitter actually living in your home, that is ideal, but if it's empty, resist the temptation to update social media on the road. It's tempting to post your pictures right away and tell all your "friends" what a great time you are having thousands of miles away...but it's not wise. Save those posts for after you're safely home!

Preparation before your trip also involves:

• Packing light. There are so many reasons for this, but the safety one is that the less stuff you have, the less there is to possibly lose, and the easier it is to carry it around. If you're always having to check bags then they're not with you, and if you have a lot of items, you can lose track of them while packing or unpacking. At home, you likely tend to keep your keys, etc. in the same place--get in the habit of packing items in the same place each time too.
• Stick with what you truly need on the trip. Leave things at home such as cards you won't use. I once had the misfortune of losing a wallet with items inside such as a library card from my hometown. Why was I carrying that? It was one more thing to replace when I got home.
• The only truly essential things you need are your travel documents--e.g., passport--and money/ways of getting money like a credit and debit card. It's wise to keep these in different places: you can zip your passport inside a pocket of your bag, and keep one card in one place, another in another place with some cash. This isn't paranoia, it just makes the chance of losing everything vanishingly small.
• Finally, I recommend making photocopies of your passport's ID pages and of your cards, or writing down your card numbers along with the emergency phone numbers to call in case a card is lost or stolen. Keep these papers* in a safe place (of course, separate from the documents themselves). You can't use a photocopy the way you would a passport, but these copies will make replacement much easier, and you can cancel a card if you happen to lose it. From experience, I can say this saved me much time.

Some people suggest scanning these documents and storing the copies in "the cloud." I'm not that digital, personally. Having something in my phone makes it more of a problem if I lose my phone, and if documents are stored on a web-based application, I'm not sure that's secure. In any case, take good care of the physical documents. Your passport is probably safest locked in a locker or safe at the place you're staying; carry the copy while you're out.

Of course, being in transit is when you'll have everything with you and you'll need to be most careful. A padlock is handy to bring along, not only for lockers you may find in budget accommodation around the world, but to lock your bag. I once traveled on a night train and made sure my bag was tucked down under the seat in front of me, not in an overhead rack where someone might have gone through it. Some travellers also suggest a retractable wire lock so you can secure a bag e.g. to a seat.

Having taken care of the most important things, you can easily replace most other items and don't have to pack a lot of clothes. The more you take, such as pricey electronics, the more you potentially stand to lose. Weigh the benefits of having the flashiest smartphone or camera against the risk you are prepared to take.

From this, it sounds as though I think theft is a common experience; in fact, you're more likely just to leave something behind through carelessness than to be a victim. Personal safety is arguably more important. You certainly don't want to avoid whole cities or countries because of a bad report on the news, but you do want to know where you're going. Visiting a new city and exploring it on foot is one of my favorite experiences...but I always have a map and some idea of how to get back to my starting place. If I get lost or just need to stop and reevaluate, rather than stop dead in the middle of the sidewalk, I tend to go into a café or somewhere to have a look at my map. It's more relaxing and I'm less likely to be distracted. (If you're truly lost, it also means you can ask someone local for guidance.)

Although it will be obvious in many places that you're a visitor, a little effort can go a long way to making your trip not only safer, but more enjoyable. For instance, wear comfortable walking shoes--preferably not brand new Nikes that really make you stand out. And don't, under any circumstances, bring one of those "fanny packs"/bum bags, or carry a wallet or other important item in a back pocket. Most theft is opportunistic, so just don't give anyone the opportunity.

Special safety considerations apply to specific kinds of travelers:

• There is no doubt that being female or gay can cause extra concerns. To some extent, this is true for women everywhere in the world, and this issue is too large to address within this post. I would just say that as for so many other reasons, it's important to be aware of cultural expectations, even if you find them sexist or homophobic. It's not in your interest to draw unnecessary attention in a place you're not sure of.
• To give one example, I personally would not wear headphones when walking around a strange city, or many other places traveling--perhaps while relaxing in transit. It may not be uniquely because I'm a woman, but I like to have all my senses alert, even while I'm taking photographs or otherwise enjoying the experience.
• Finally, if you're planning on specific activities at your destination, do prepare for them by gathering information and bringing any necessary gear. Despite what I said about traveling light, you don't want to be that woman (as I recently read about in the news!) who wandered up Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Britain, on a whim wearing shorts and carrying only a candy bar. Nor do you want to risk your life by hiking into the Grand Canyon in the heat of summer armed only with Pepsis (yes, I've seen those guys too). Preparation!

A lot of travel safety is just the same attitude and preparation you'd use at home in your ordinary life. You probably have a smoke alarm (at least I hope you do) and health insurance at home. Well, on the road you want to make sure you're covered by medical insurance as well (and keep with your important documents* any information you'd need to make a claim--policy number, phone number, etc.) . And as for smoke alarms...whenever I check into someplace, I always look where the fire exit is and figure out which way I'd go if I had to exit my room/the building suddenly. I've twice experienced a fire alarm going off in the middle of the night, and if you haven't checked these, it's disorienting to figure out the exit when you've just woken up somewhere you've never stayed before. If there was ever really a fire, it could save you precious time.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember is perspective. Focus on the top priorities (such as survival in the case of an emergency) and even if something else goes wrong, you can recover from it. In all my years of travel, I've only had one bad experience, and even that trip turned out great.

One last thing: listen to your instincts. Our brains subconsciously signal us when something "feels wrong" and get us out of trouble. You are likely to meet people on your travels who want to get to know you, perhaps fellow travelers who innocently want to know where you're staying, or where you're going next. These can be opportunities for great experiences. But following a stranger to a party in a totally unfamiliar location and getting drunk or stoned is not. You need to be aware of your surroundings and enough "in focus" to avoid trouble...just as you would at home.

If someone starts following you around, asking questions which are none of their business, or suggesting you do odd things (participate in a game, jump a turnstile), you may be the potential victim of a con. Never feel bad about cutting off a conversation, even if a stranger has hitherto been friendly. No matter where you are in the world, if at any time someone makes you feel uncomfortable or a situation just isn't giving off good vibes, walk away. 

Your mother will thank me :-)
 

Useful links for more information:
On the home front: http://simplisafe.com/wireless-security-systems has a great blog, with tips on everything from traveling safely internationally, to winter blackout advice. You can find it here: http://simplisafe.com/blog

And a great blog for independent travel, including safety information, is http://www.indietraveller.co.

 

Language, please

In the raging torrents of populist politics that currently threaten to sink the Western world, I once again find myself unable to take my eyes off the shipwreck that is U.S. news. Specifically, the election. Much has been made of "language" in this cycle, meaning bad language or insults. I'd like to note a much broader way in which language has worsened the situation.

The most important--some would say only--job of a writer is to choose words carefully, to say precisely what she means to say. This is not primarily so I, the writer, can go on to glory in my comparison of U.S. news to a shipwreck in the opening sentence. It is so the words mean to you, my reader, what I mean by them, and carry the intended power.

Words, and images, are often used lazily, however. (That sentence is an example--who misuses them? How lazy not to say.)  For instance, I lived in the U.S.A. from 1972 to 2000. In all that time, as far as the news was concerned, "Muslims" meant people out to destroy innocent lives. Depending on who the U.S. was mad at at the time, they were Iranians, Palestinians, Libyans, or Iraqis (Iraqis were "good" in the 1980s, as were Afghan mujahideen). Since September 11, 2001, "Muslims" has meant al-Qaida, I.S., and now Syrians generally. But always, they were someone foreign screaming on TV.

Now it's 2016 and some Americans are being accused of "Islamophobia." What does that mean to them? All those decades and September 11 and all the rest of it, and now they want to deport the dentist down the street and it's a problem? Since when?

Another example is the phrase "political correctness." I first heard this on a jokey ad in 1989, about how people in the '60s had done drugs and had unsafe sex, because it was "politically correct" to do those kinds of things then. The joke was that Baby Boomers had had all the fun. But in the ensuing twenty-five years, political incorrectness has come to convey anything I want to say that someone, somewhere, doesn't like. The range is too wide to be meaningful.

For one person, it's saying "Merry Christmas" in a store. For another it's calling the President of the United States a n-----. Both of these happen in America, and both are constitutionally protected free speech, but there's a world of difference between them. That world of difference is not law enforcement or speech codes. It's taste.

We are supposed to be an evolving species. We're supposed to discover that x or y is "homophobic" and stop saying it, not because it's banned or politically incorrect, but because the gay person is our neighbor and gratuitously hurting someone is wrong.

It's one thing when an elderly white relative moans about how hard it is to remember not to say "colored people" anymore. But we don't expect this kind of thoughtlessness to spread unchecked into the public square.

Because that's what it really is--thoughtlessness. Not thinking hard enough about the words we use and the harm that they can cause. Think of the insidious way in which Nazism, one of the worst atrocities of the twentieth or any other century, has been repeatedly and lazily used for comparisons. We hear this appalling misuse in phrases like soup Nazi, grammar Nazis, and feminazis. Further, every time Saddam, Assad, or any other brutal dictator stops being our guy and starts being the enemy, he is routinely compared to Hitler. (A brutal dictator like Chile's Pinochet, who assumed power after "our" September 11, 1973 coup, was not.)

The appeasement at Munich is trotted out every time we want to warn about some opponent's slippery slope. Every undeclared war, every "regime change," is compared to the sacrifices our forebears made in World War II--"would you not have stopped the Nazis??" T-shirts depicted George W. Bush as a terrorist, and Barack Obama is portrayed as a totalitarian intent on taking away our rights and guns. As a consequence, the original horrors have lost their power to shock.

After hearing about "Hitler" every five minutes for an entire lifetime, how are we supposed to recognize fascism when we actually see it?

The thoughtless misuse of words is not free speech. Freedom of speech is the freedom to call out, object, have rational argument, and protest. It involves choosing words and thinking about the consequences before we use them. In some world orders, the consequences of protest include being carried out on a stretcher.

When we hear a man longing for those good old days, we must not call that political incorrectness. We need to call it what it is, and hope crying wolf all those other times has not robbed the right words of their power.