Twelve percent of Americans own a passport.
Twelve percent.
Fully seventy-eight percent of Americans have never bothered — and do not plan to bother — to see the world.
For someone like me — someone obsessed with travel, someone already ready to see some new place, visit some new culture, or learn about another way of life — that statistic boggles the mind.
It explains a great deal, though — including why, so often, friends of ours are still possessed by a Cold War era view of America.
Not too long ago, an acquaintance said to me, “Of course America is still the greatest country on the planet. When you travel, don’t people still marvel when you say you’re from America? Don’t they still automatically think of us as the greatest country in the world? Don’t they want to be us?”
“As recently as 1990, that was the case,” I replied. “But no more. Today, most of the people I meet abroad assume, at first, I’m Canadian or British, because Americans don’t travel any more. I’ve had at least a dozen total strangers tell me how disappointed they are in our government and its attitudes toward the world community. During my last trip to Europe, an Italian pointed out the irony of America calling itself ‘the Land of Freedom’ while our government systematically restricts research, free speech, the right to demonstrate, the right of two consenting adults to set a course for their own lives…”
My acquaintance — who never travels — looked furious. “That can’t be right. Everyone knows America is the greatest country in the history of the world.”
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