On this somber morning, less than twenty-four hours after a large French city saw a grave loss of life at the hands of a terrorist, I feel compelled to take a break from my typical photo galleries and national park write-ups to share some thoughts I have about traveling in the age of terrorism. As anyone who knows me personally can attest, I’m an intrinsically political, social justice-minded person, and by and large, I try to keep my beliefs out of this website. Today, and this year more generally, warrants an exception. My heart breaks with not just with every report of an ISIS-motivated terrorist attack, but with every pop-news article lambasting the plight of refugees, immigrants, and the global Muslim community writ large. As someone who has traveled to a number of the countries recently targeted by international terrorism, I may not be able to add anything new to the conversation but I also believe silence would make me complicit in the collective deprivation of empathy our world seems to be experiencing.
Contrary to what the 24/7 cable news cycle would like to have us believe, we live in a relatively safe moment in human history. And I like to think we’re only continuing on this path of improvement, as we collectively engage in honest discussions about gendered violence, police brutality, international terror tactics, gun control, racial injustice, and drone usage. Plane travel has become banal, and I don’t worry about visiting countries with different standards of sanitation than the United States because I’m never going to contract polio or yellow fever.
What I’m trying to say is this: overall, I feel safe whenever and wherever I travel.
I especially never worry about terrorism in the post-9/11 sense; statistically, I know terrible attacks like what happened yesterday in Nice, France are rare. The few earnest threats to my safety I’ve experienced while traveling abroad relate to the always-present “creepy dude” that seems to transcend cultures, languages, and religions. Seriously, I’ve never visited a place without creepy dudes, and while I believe that race- and gender-based power imbalances constitute terrorism, no, I’m not afraid of surviving through – or possibly dying in – something like the Paris bombings in November 2015.
As an avid traveler, this is a question I am frequently asked. Last summer, when Kevin and I were preparing for our September trip to Istanbul, Turkey, friends and family barraged us with their security concerns. I assured everyone we’d be fine.
And we were. We spent six lovely days in Istanbul, and in that time, I formed some of my favorite travel memories to date. The only questionable moment of safety came when Kevin and I stepped outside of the Grand Baazar for some air and, after deciding to head back inside, I was intercepted by a young male police officer who obstinately kept hitting on me even though I was trying to pass. I felt like asking him who I should report his behavior to. Himself?
Prior to touching down at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport, Kevin and I drove around central Europe for four and a half days, spending time in both Munich and Vienna. At the time, the “migrant crisis” dominated headlines around the world, and we were both inundated with questions. Were migrants really lining the streets? Were there riots at the train stations? Were dirty families escaping war zones sleeping at the airport?
No, no, and no. I refused to answer the xenophobic questions that came my way, the ones that insinuated our safety would be jeopardized by a large influx of Muslims.
When I started planning our next European extravaganza, scheduled to take place in March 2016, I didn’t hesitate when placing Amsterdam and Brussels on our itinerary, despite chatter that both cities were currently under threats from ISIS. The city I called home for three years, Washington, D.C., has long been targeted by ISIS in their online videos and I simply never saw these threats as viable. I continued planning, undeterred.
On March 10, Kevin, myself, and six of our family members took off for Iceland. Two days later we continued on to Scotland, and five days after that, on March 17, we landed in Amsterdam. In the Netherlands, we rented a car and drove to Brussels, Luxembourg, and Cologne.
At this point, you might have done the math and realized our itinerary would have placed us in Belgium right around the time of the Brussels bombings, wherein ISIS operatives strategically blew up a Brussels metro station and the city’s international airport. Luckily, we left Brussels almost exactly seventy-two hours before the bombs went off, but most of us were still a little shaken. For one, during our visit, my sister, brother-in-law, and his fiance used Maalbeek metro station, the one targeted in the attacks. And two, in my original plan for the trip, we would have been in Brussels during the bombings.
It breaks my heart to watch cities I’ve come to love throughout my travels – Paris, Brussels, and Istanbul – fall victim to international terrorism. It breaks my heart even more when I learn how each city’s tourism rates have dropped in the wake of disaster. Each gorgeous, energetic, and deeply historical city has so much to offer travelers, along with insightful and friendly locals eager to share their culture with those hoping to learn more. And this is one of the truest tragedies of the tactics used by ISIS – they are dividing us, instilling us with fear, and depriving us of the wholly humanizing and compassionate experiences one inevitably has while meeting others abroad. They are teaching us to fear anyone who is different, and this dearth of humanity inevitably leads to something akin to a death.
Am I going to stop traveling? Of course not, and I hope no one else does, either. Americans are significantly more likely to be killed in a car accident or by falling furniture, and we all still drive our vehicles and purchase bookcases. The benefits far outweigh the risks when it comes to exploring the world, and since the shooting in Nice yesterday, I’ve felt almost an obligation to pen this essay, and while my thoughts certainly are not novel, I believe they ought to be said.
Now, more than ever, we need to rely on travel to provide us with empathy and insight into cultures radically different than our own. Fear, especially fear of one another, hurts way more people than it helps. Our own experiences abroad can and should serve as a reminder that we’re all in this together, that we’re all equally pained and confused and terrified by the series of terrible bombings across southwest Asia and Europe. As citizens of the world, our shared histories and much-needed humanity is under siege, and I urge caution when digesting the media, which would like us Americans to believe in an “us against them” narrative.
Rather than avoid travel, I think that, in the age of organized international terrorism, we need to depend on it.
