Years ago, an editor told me that if I'd just do some traveling, it might cure my conservatism problem.
Travel, she figured, broadens the mind.
She was a liberal, like all but a tiny few of the journalists I've known.
In her newsroom, they would sometimes have humorous readings of my more conservative columns.
One that got a particular laugh was when I wrote that everyone, even journalists, should invest in the stock market. Patently ridiculous, they hooted. On our measly pay? Preposterous!
I suggested folks buy a share or two of the local heavy equipment manufacturer, Caterpillar.
Cat was a bargain back in 2008, at $40 a share.
Last Friday, Cat stock closed at $726.20 a share.
(I rest my case, Your Honor.)
That's a gain of 1,715.5 percent. But those newsroom liberals were way too smart to take my advice.
That editor's advice to travel presented a rare opportunity to respond.
Because in the Fall of 1971, thanks to a wonderful program in which the University of Wyoming participated, I sailed around the world on World Campus Afloat, visiting 11 countries – Samoa, Australia, New Guinea, Singapore, Bali, Ceylon, India, Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa, Sierra Leone, and the Canary Islands.
I came back figuring that nobody on the planet should starve when our country has the agricultural prowess it does. Seemed simple to me, not knowing that trying to feed the world wouldn't necessarily result in a fed world, or an appreciative world. And not grasping the vast fraud that could emerge from such a goal. (See present day Minneapolis.)
Today, it's clear to me that free-market capitalism is the best way to feed a hungry world, and, more important, enable hungry nations to feed themselves.
One interesting thing I learned on that trip – timely as today's headlines – is that every one of those 11 countries we visited put great value in maintaining secure borders.
In most countries, Customs officials would board the ship even before we docked, checking passports, visas, paperwork. I saw bottles of expensive, duty-free scotch change hands, to assure friendly relations with local Customs officials.
We were told that an American passport would sell for $10,000 on the black market. So our passports were safely locked away aboard ship. When we went ashore, we carried International Student Identity Cards, and when a big wave washed mine away in Hawaii, it took some doing to get back on the ship.
Point is, there was no country of the 11 we visited that didn't take its borders seriously. Unlike our country during the four disastrous years of the Biden presidency.
Like today, there were plenty of illegal drugs around back then. One student was arrested on the dock in Darwin for selling drugs to an undercover officer. He was allowed to fly home immediately, avoiding prosecution in a foreign country.
Most serious about maintaining border security was our own country, when we arrived in New York. Teams of Customs officials were on board the night before we docked. I heard one tell a colleague, “This is the old S.S. Atlantic,” and tell him about nooks and crannies where drugs could be hidden. They knew the ship better than we did.
It took me five hours to clear Customs. Some students were expected to bring in drugs, and they got special scrutiny, delaying everyone else.
I had a bottle of Mateus wine from the Canary Islands, and the tough old Customs officer noted that I was still a month shy of my 21st birthday. But he let me keep it.
I remember his final words:
“President Nixon welcomes you home.”
So I look at what's going on in Minneapolis as a strange aberration from the world I learned about through travel. Of course we need secure borders. Of course we need to deport dangerous criminals. Of course our cities should cooperate with Customs officials.
But rank hatred for Donald Trump blinds many Democrats to something as fundamental as secure borders.
Sadly, they'd prefer a murderer next door, or a child rapist, or a predator who hunts down young girls out for a jog, over supporting anything the hated Trump has anything to do with.
Not exactly the liberal message that old editor had in mind when she suggested travel.
Dave Simpson can be contacted at DaveSimpson145@hotmail.com
