Honestly, maybe it would help for some people. But I’ve known plenty of people who did travel and are still blinkered and unreasonable, or prone to embracing extremism. I think you have to be open and humble for that sort of thing to have an impact, you know?
And of course plenty of Americans live without adequate heating, food, or clean water. Most of us don’t have to go far to find those things. It might be more important for more Americans to travel within our own borders and really see how others who are less fortunate are faring. Maybe then we can get more vocal support for humane domestic policies that will hopefully translate to humane foreign policies as well.
That’s my $.02, FWIW.
As for civil war, for most (white, privileged) people in the US an actual war is an abstract, something their grandfathers or great grandfathers participated in, that we celebrate for having saved democracy. We wrapped that generation in glory for sacrificing so much and ignored the very real pain it caused. The reality of what that generation went through (WW2) has been abstracted away and the last generation of holocaust survivors are starting to pass away. The whole concept that a war would disrupt their day to day life is both exciting, even welcome (they’re not doing the normal grind anymore, but are participating in “real” history) and mass mediated. Even the wars that are going on right now, we see them via TV, radio, papers, the internet… it’s not a lived reality for us, so we just see it as we see a movie, that’s tragic, sad, kind of intense, but not a reality.
So… I don’t know.
