Despite post-9/11 jitters, we need to get around more to shed our prejudices
By Pico Iyer

The images, of course, will not go away: the planes exploding in flames, bodies falling through the air. And in their wake, more mundane but still disquieting pictures-endless lines in the airports, armed guards watching as shoeless innocents empty their pockets (while across the world people clamor for America's humiliation). To many, as the peak vacation season draws near, travel may seem a less appealing prospect than it has ever been.

And yet, I would argue, travel has never been so urgent, even necessary, as it is today. To at least a small extent, the horrors of last September seem to have arisen from people knowing dangerously little about the far side of the world: Islamic radicals tilting against an America they associate only with its economic and political might (or the pop-cultural blast of its images) and cruelly ignoring the human reality that is the true America; and, later on, Washington responding through a President who had seldom been abroad, and a CIA that by some accounts did not have a single Pashtu speaker in Afghanistan. Caught in the middle, as ever, were those ordinary, open-minded souls who might have harbored subtler and more enlightened thoughts about what Islam means, and America.

Travel is how we put a face and a voice to the Other and step a little beyond our secondhand images of the alien. It is, in fact, how we learn about the world and come to terms (and sometimes peace) with it. All the information in the world on our flashing or high-definition screens cannot begin to convey the feel and smell, the human truth, of another culture. And all of us are lucky enough to live at a time when the far corners of the world are more accessible physically than ever before. The minute I got off the plane in Yemen last year, I could see how everything I thought I knew about that country was wrong and how far most of its people lived emotionally from, say, the October 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Southern Yemen. Likewise, the minute a Yemeni sets foot in New York City, she sees it as quite different from the lawless jungle of gun-toting druglords and prostitutes she may have imagined. Most people in the developing world, though, do not have the opportunity or resources to come and see us. It is therefore up to us-at least those of us with the time and money-to go and see them.

考译文：

　　飞机在浓烟中爆炸，人们从高楼上跳下，这些画面我们当然不会一下子忘掉。那以后的景象虽没有那么夺目，却仍令人不安：机场内无辜的旅客地排成长龙，持枪的警卫盯着他们脱下鞋子，把口袋掏个底朝天（在世界各地，人们看到美国出丑正幸灾乐祸。）面对这番景象，假期虽是日日逼近，旅行的兴致却从没有这么低沉过。
　　但是，我却有理由认为，我们今天急需旅行，必须旅行。可以这么说，去年秋天发生的恐怖事件究其根源，多少和人们的无知有关，对世界上远离自己的地方已无知到了危险的地步：伊斯兰极端分子誓与美国为敌，可他们眼中美国的形象只是经济实力雄厚和政治一言九鼎，要么便是不停出现在大众传媒上的美国形象，但他们却故意无视美国人性的一面；在美国方面，事后领导反恐的也是一位很少出国的总统，而参与反恐的中央情报局据称在阿富汗没有一个会说 普什图语的人。介于两者之间的倒是思想开明的普通大众。他们对伊斯兰和美国的认识更近情理，更加开明。

　　旅行能使我们对不了解的人们有一个真切的了解，能超越对陌生人的间接印象。其实，旅行恰恰是我们了解这个世界，接受这个世界，有时和这个世界和平相处的方法。我们在高保真电视屏幕上获得的所有信息根本不能呈现给我们一个活生生的、充满人性的异域文化。我们这代人十分幸运，因为从来没有人能像我们这样亲自去世界的各个角落访问。去年夏天，我一走下飞机踏上也门国土，就马上意识到我原来对那个国家的认识都是错误的，而大多数也门人在感情上也并不认同像 2000 年 10 月发生在南也门的炸毁克尔号驱逐舰那种做法。同样，一个也门人一来到纽约市也会看到，原来这里并不像他原来想象的那样，毒枭持枪横行，妓女四处可见，是个无法无天的丛林。不过大多数发展中国家的人既无机会，也无资源来看我们，所以，就应该由我们，至少是我们中间那些有钱有时间的人，去看他们。

The principle applies, of course, even if we go no farther than Washington or the Lebanese restaurant on the other side of town; we have the chance at any moment to walk outside our prejudices. Those who stay home may think the outside world is dangerous (and the more they stay home, the more dangerous it will seem). Yet as soon as we travel, we are reminded that, for example, during the 1980s when war was tearing apart Beirut, San Salvador and Kabul, Washington had a higher murder rate than any of them. Last year, when I took my 70-year- old mother on holiday to Syria, she quickly saw that its people were much friendlier than the country's dictatorship suggested, that the roads were clean and that (for a visitor in any case) life was in most respects as safe as in the affluent California town where she lives. Insofar as such places are difficult, traveling abroad allows us to appreciate better all the opportunities and freedoms of home that we otherwise take for granted.

In the wake of the 9/11 violence, most Americans were wise enough to realize that the terrorist atrocities had nothing to do with Hamid, in his skullcap, who runs the grocery store around the corner, while all the Muslims I knew grieved as if the losses were their own. Yet many people wondered why America had provoked such animosity. Traveling to Bolivia, Vietnam, India and many other countries in the months since the attacks, I have been sobered to see the words U.S. OUT OF AFGHANISTAN! scrawled across the walls of an elegant colonial building in the Andes (while a shoeshine boy down the street told me he longed to come to America to help fight terrorists). In many closed or impoverished countries, meeting Americans is the only way the people can learn that America is not the axis of evil-a George W. Bush phrase that some foreigners have turned back on the U.S.

In some ways, Sept. 11 was a harrowing reminder of how truly we all live in the same neighborhood now, even if the differences and distances between us remain as great as ever. In any neighborhood, it is the people who keep their doors locked and their curtains drawn who are the truly menacing ones. One of the difficult things about Sept. 11 was how powerless most people felt as they watched the destruction onscreen. Many of us, in fact, do have the power, however small, to take the first step toward real communication-by going to Beijing, or Mexico City, or, best of all, Damascus.