Now Get Out There and See Your World, People!

Pico Iyer has offered another rallying cry in support of world travel in our post-September 11 world, this time in a recent issue of Time. We swear we’ve seen or heard him make a similar point at least several times this year alone, but somehow we never get tired of Iyer’s eloquent cheers. The world is a neighborhood, Iyer writes this time. “In any neighborhood, it is the people who keep their doors locked and their curtains drawn who are the truly menacing ones,” he continues. “One of the things about the events of last fall was how powerless most people felt as they watched the destruction on-screen. Many of us, in fact, do have the power, however small, to take the first step toward real communication—by going to Beijing, or Mexico City, or, best of all, Damascus.” We couldn’t find the essay online, but it appears in the May 27 issue.

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