Foreign Travel, An American Requirement

I recently found that Mark Twain supported my theory that foreign travel(Canada doesn’t count) should be a requirement of all American-born citizens.

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness and many of our people need it sorely on those accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

Having seen the corruption in China where citizens are told where they will live and in Egypt where there is a clear disregard for public sanitation and trash cans, I’m grateful for the craziness that is the American system. Is our system perfect? No. But without foreign travel,  I may have never seen beyond the Republican vs. Democrat debate and discovered that what we have is much, much better than the alternative.