It’s been well over a month since I’ve posted to the blog. I guess you could say I took a bit of a vacation from blogging, but that wouldn’t really be true. I’ve actually been doing a lot of thinking about this post (and others soon to come) over the past few weeks…
As we enter “vacation season”, I find myself wondering why I don’t take more vacation time. As you may already know, compared to the rest of the “industrialized world”, we Americans as a whole don’t take much vacation time at all. I’ve been wondering if my lack of desire to sit on a beach or mountainside somewhere doing nothing comes more from my culture than myself. If that’s the case, I suppose I’m more of an American than I think I am. This started me thinking about how much my American culture has influenced other areas of my thinking.
Having lived in other parts of the world (albeit for relatively brief periods of time), I’ve fancied myself more of a “world citizen” than an American citizen. Sure, I vote here. I take up sides in political debate here, and I’m not 100% up on what’s happening in other parts of the planet at all times. Still, I feel more like a citizen of Earth than a citizen of the USA a lot of the time. I think this is because I worry about the ramifications of certain policies various governments maintain. I worry about our ability to join together in the event of some planetary disaster. I also worry about the way people seem overly threatened by those of different religious and political persuasions. I mean, aren’t we really all the same under the skin? Don’t we all share the same concerns for the present and the future? Don’t we all have some tie to the past that is very important to each of us? I think we do.
During my travels, I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to talk to people from all over the planet. For example, I was in Germany with the Deanna Bogart Band as the Berlin wall was coming down. We even played at one of the celebrations on the night of the official Reunification which, believe it or not, wasn’t as joyous as the press would lead us to believe. We also played at a technology conference in East Germany to people who had never seen real live Americans before. Our accommodations for this performance were in a school which still had posters on the wall outlining what to do in the event of various emergencies – including nuclear attack. The type of emergency was transmitted to the people via various warning sirens which were not unlike our own civil defense siren alerts, although there were many more of them to memorize. (In a moment of weakness, I took one of the posters from the wall and brought it home with me. It hung in my studio for many years, and now waits in my garage for the appropriate spot to be displayed again). I talked with young people in East Germany who had lived their entire lives unable to take a 20 minute train trip to the next town, just because it was on the other side of the wall. I talked to Russian, East German, and Czechoslovakian soldiers as they sat on their tanks waiting to leave town after so many years, and had the chance to rent picks and hammers to break off parts of the Berlin Wall before they hauled it away. I once watched a gentleman who was acting as our guide cry like a baby while he was looking at a rather large mural of Lenin in the stairwell of a building we were playing in. I asked what was wrong, and he said ” I am crying because tomorrow they take this mural down. I have waited all my life for that moment”. I will never forget that.
Recalling those people I met in East Germany makes me think: how many of us have waited all our lives for one moment? I mean, really waited all our lives for one moment? Yes, we all wait at times for various things, but I think part of our trouble is caused by the simple fact that the majority of us have not had to wait all our lives (or even a significant portion of our lives) for one certain moment. We’ve forgotten how possessing the ability to endure can strengthen us. Our society has evolved into one where we can have practically anything we want at practically any time. When I find myself whining because my Internet connection is only operating at 4MB per second (which, as point of reference for my impatience, rarely happens for more than a couple hours), or because I forgot something at the store and have to go back for it, I realize there is no excuse for it. Problem is, I usually don’t realize this at the time! I need to change that.
I don’t think for a second that merely learning the value of patience or what truly matters will miraculously change the culture of our country, let alone the world. But maybe it’s a place we can start. Tolerance and intolerance are both learned – we do not inherently possess them at birth (although a baby can seem pretty intolerant of having to wait for its feeding). I like to think that I am on the path toward conquering my intolerance, but I know I still have a long way to go.
You may be asking what all of these seemingly random observations have to do with my initial thoughts about vacation? It’s simple: you see, my wife and I are about to begin making our vacation plans. And I need to become more tolerant.