The Shrinking World
For most of my life, the world has gotten bigger. My mother took her small Upstate New York perspective in 1946 and globalized herself by going to work for the Rockefeller Foundation in Venezuela. No trip to Italy for her, she went right out to the deep end of the pool in the mountains of the Orinoco. I inherited that global orientation by being born on the shores of Southern Florida and flew at one month old, back to Caracas to live for four years. We then moved to Santa Monica to give me a taste of the California lifestyle, actually going to nursery school with Jerry Lewis’ kids. Back to Ithaca and then off to the small tropical valley in Costa Rica broadened the range of my perspective. So as not to get too used to the tropics, after a few years it was back to the states to experience 40-below cold in Wisconsin, where ice fishing is a way of life half the year. From the Midwest, I got to experience the Northeast in south-central Maine during my early adolescence. Then it was off for that missed trip to Italy for high school in Rome before heading back to Upstate New York for college. My worldview just kept getting bigger and bigger as I grew into adulthood.
Then I moved my act to New York City, arguably the most global city in the world. From there, my sense of the world only got wider and bigger. Within three years of starting in the banking business, I was off to Europe on my first business trip. From there, as I expanded my brief, my reach expanded East-West and North-South. I spent the next two decades traveling to every corner of the world you can imagine. Most businesspeople get to go to Europe or Asia, but I did all of that plus traveling to Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Australia, Canada, Eastern Europe and everywhere in-between. There was no corner of the Earth other than Antarctica that did not beckon me for one reason or another. As I raised my children I tried to give them a chance to get exposure to some of those other parts of the world just as my mother had passed that perspective on to me. And all that time, the world kept constantly expanding to the point where I felt that I had more or less reached its limits.
So, it is logical that at some point, since the Universe may still be expanding, but the inhabited world has more or less reached its limits, that I would eventually find that the world’s size would start to go the other way. I think we feel that now in an accelerating way. There are two fundamental reasons for this change of directions. Let’s dispense with the obvious reason. We, like all people who get to a certain age, find their world travel getting greater until our bucket lists get satisfied to the point where we start to run out of places we want to see before we die. At that point, we start having a harder and harder time finding places we simply have to get to. This happens as we find it harder and harder to be comfortable traveling too much. Everyone is different in that regard, but its undeniable that it is a factor since most of the trips one looks at offer up activity grades for themselves ranging from extremely active to modestly active. There are other factors too, the most obvious one to me being altitude. I shy away from places where I have to go to altitude. Hot and cold places are also given extra consideration as do places that are too dry or too wet. In other words, we get a bit pickier as we get older. Comfort matters more and that rises on the list as curiosity wanes. Let’s face it, we are way beyond the monthly National Geographic as the source of our familiarity with a venue. We all know a lot about where we want to go and have mostly gone there virtually many times, whether in movies or travel series.
The other very real reason why our world is getting smaller and smaller has to do with the geopolitical scene. The United States Department of State publishes travel ratings on all countries and regions to help its citizens gauge the risks of traveling to certain parts of the world. It rates the world as one of four ratings. A Level 1 rating implies that you should exercise normal precautions. Level 2 rating says you should exercise increased caution. Level 3 ratings tell you to reconsider your travel plans since there is high risk and the State Department may not be able to help you if you get into trouble. And then there is a Level 4 rating which states very clearly that you should NOT travel to that place. The Level 4 countries are Afghanistan, Belarus, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Myanmar, Gaza, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Mali, 20% of Mexico, North Korea, Russia, Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Yemen. Those 21 places represent 10% of the 195 countries in the world. The Level 3 countries (28 of them) are grouped in Central America and northern South America, a lot of central Africa, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and China. That means there are 25% of the world’s countries that we are warned against traveling to.
As I look over the Level 3 rated countries I have been to most of them already. In fact of the Level 4 countries, I been to a few of those already. But Kim has not been to most of these places except perhaps Russia and there are many of these places that would otherwise be on her bucket list, most notably China, and that is mostly off the screen right now. I have been advising her that we should not go to China while the geopolitical environment is getting more and more tense between China and the U.S. Every day we hear about another American who is getting incarcerated in Russia, so its safe to say that has earned its place on the no-fly list. We would never dream of traveling to North Korea or Iran, so why would we feel comfortable going to China other than we simply want to go? Spending our golden years in a Chinese prison is not my idea of a good time and I don’t scare easily, but I feel it is simply too risky to go to China right now.
If you look at the State Department risk map, you see a funny thing or two. Most of Western Europe (including England) is now rated Level 2, requiring extra caution. But the countries of much of Eastern Europe enjoy a Level 1 rating. Imagine that. South Africa is a Level 2, like Europe but Angola, Namibia, Botswana and Zambia are Level 1. Chile and Brazil are Level 2, but Argentina and Paraguay (Fucking Paraguay!) are Level 1 countries. Almost all of Southeast Asia are Level 1, as are Mongolia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyz Republic. And the safest country in the world? It’s Iceland for some reason.
My point is just this, the world is getting smaller and smaller and the list of places one can go safely are getting fewer and fewer. The shrinking world is becoming a less and less inviting place and I am sorry to say that in two generations I have seen this world become a more hostile place like it was during WWII. I hate the realization that this whole world can’t help itself from falling prey to the Strauss–Howe generational cycle that says we are at the Fourth Turning and destined to come back to the saeculum of hatred that characterized the degeneration into global crisis as it did in the late 30’s and 40’s.