Hackney Travel Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Area

It takes about four weeks of traveling to begin to disconnect from everyday life.
Humans are not at the top of the food chain.
Those who had the least, had the most.

Poverty is relative. By this scale, there are no poor in the U.S.
Environmentalists’ priorities are misplaced on U.S. lawn trimmers; India is an ecological disaster on a biblical scale.

Buddhist Himalayas (Sikkim and Bhutan)

Everything material turns to dust. A life focused on materialism is a life doomed to pain and frustration.
We make our own time. Thus we make our own stress.

The layers of history are many. Current times are merely the top strata, destined to be smothered by the events, standards, beliefs and cultures of future societies.
From a Muslim’s perspective, Islam is God, version 3.0, with Judaism being 1.0 and Christianity 2.0.

Western media is nearly 100% selective, skewed and filtered, with advancement of a social and political agenda far outweighing the objective reporting of facts. This is true regardless if the media organization is on the left or the right ends of the political spectrum.
If there are friendlier, more welcoming and more hospitable people than the Syrians on the face of this earth, we have yet to meet them.

Don’t believe everything you read, see or hear. Far from the “friend of the West, land of milk and honey, full of people who love their King” it is often portrayed as, Jordan was the most unhappy place we found in the entire world.
Spend a day with or as a Western woman and you’ll understand why the local women are covered from head to toe, and happy to be so. Jordanian and Saudi men have the sexual maturity of the average 13 year old with his first copy of Playboy.

There are countless millions of square miles of unspoiled wilderness in America. The situation is about 180 degrees different from what is presented by the environmentalists scaring you into yet another donation. All you have to do is get off the couch and get out and see it for yourself.

The development model humanity has been on since we climbed out of the swamp is doomed. As people get more educated and more affluent, they reproduce less. Japan, the most developed society on earth, is on a demographic death spiral.

The 19^th century was Europe’s. The 20^th century was America’s. The 21^st century is China’s.
The ecological disaster of China makes India look like a Greenpeace planned, optimized and managed community.

South America

Most of the problems we live with in the modern world, from failed states to failed regions, from nation state conflict to ethnic cleansing, from weak institutions to pervasive corruption, are the long-term effects of European colonialism.
There was no U.S. foreign policy decision in the last 100 years more damaging and short sighted than abandoning Latin America.
The vacillation between corrupt rightist and corrupt leftist regimes in most Latin American countries will likely continue for the foreseeable future.
The cultures of Latin America have much to offer and many lessons to teach; unfortunately, the nations of the east and west are generally too self-righteous, smug and self-absorbed to learn them.

Global

People are mostly the same everywhere, with similarities far outweighing differences.
The danger of foreign adventure travel is blown completely out of proportion. Unless and until you get out into the world, you’ll never realize how safe it is compared to a typical American city.
Every country we visited had a palpable sense of national and/or societal purpose, something completely lacking in American life today.
The greatest challenge the world faces is fundamentalism. Overseas it is primarily religious fundamentalism. In Europe and the U.S. it is ideological fundamentalism.

If you have questions or comments please contact Douglas Hackney