Why travel

I've noticed in some of the coverage of the overheated security response to the Detroit underwear-explosives guy that there has been a trend around chill about traveling. Lots of the (usually overwrought) commentary on cbc and the globe sites has taken the form of "I'm just going to stay home, thank you very much." One guy from NZ proposed that people should only be allowed to fly on planes from the countries that they were citizens of. It's kind of laughable, but it's also really interesting to me -- two diverse forces, an opening up of the world, cultural mixing and bridging of differences in unprecedented ways in human history, and a real backlash against difference and otherness.

There was a good piece in the NY Times this weekend about not giving into this kind of hunkering down isolationsim:

Still, a fortress mentality settles in each time a new instance of attempted airborne thuggery hits the airwaves. In the wake of alarming headlines, an obstacle course of cumbersome but laudable security precautions unrolls at airports, leading many of the earth’s seven-billion-odd inhabitants to resolve to remain earthbound as much as possible. One goal of terrorists is to make ordinary people afraid to leave their homes and interact with the wider world. Attacks on individual courage may leave no scars, but that does not mean they do no damage.

It's really the paradox and the balance we have to strike -- we can only create novel approaches to incommensurate worldviews when we can figure out how to see each other as humans; and we can only see each other as humans if we actually make contact.