Rick Steves in Gardens: ‘Fear is for people who don’t get out’

TV host and author sees travel as defiance of fear-mongering.

Rick Steves sees travel as a political act, a show of defiance against hatred and fear-mongering.

“Fear is for people who don’t get out very much,” Steves, an author and host of a popular PBS travel show, declared to a crowd at a Palm Beach Gardens senior living community this past week.

Since 9/11, Americ ans have become “quite fearful” and “ethnocentric,” he said.

Profit-driven corporate media and a 24/7 news cycle focused on blood and crises are to blame for the notion that travel is dangerous, Steves said during a talk at La Posada, near the Gardens Mall.

“It is safer to travel today than any other time in our lifetime,” he said, acknowledging occasional terror attacks.

Palm Beach Gardens resident Marilyn Levy recently returned from India and has traveled to Italy and Spain with Steves’ guidebooks.

“He’s a wonderful speaker, and he really does make the case for traveling and broadening your horizons,” Levy said of Steves.

The travel, she said, simultaneously makes her appreciative of the quality of life in the United States and appreciative of the way other people live.

When Americans experience other cultures and meet people from other countries, it makes it more difficult for them to demonize others or be demonized by propaganda, Steves said.

Many of the stories he shared c ame from Turkey, where he once led a group to a rooftop where they watched a whirling dervish. A dervish is a man from an Islamic sect who wears a billowing robe to pray and dance in a way that symbolizes the love of God connecting with creation, Steves said.

While he was in eastern Turkey, Steves also stumbled on a stadium filled with about 200 high school students rallying for a secular government. Islamic fundamentalism was spreading just outside Turkey’s borders, and they wanted to preserve the separation of church and state.

The U.S. Department of State has issued a warning strongly discouraging people from going to Turkey and telling them to avoid southeastern Turkey because of the threat of terrorism. “In addition, an increase in anti-American rhetoric has the potential to inspire independent actors to carry out acts of violence against U.S. citizens,” the travel warning states.

S t e v e s d e s c r i b e d a n o t h e r enlightening experience in Germany. He was in the glass dome atop the renovated Reichstag parliament building in Berlin, surrounded by Germans who were moved by the ability to look down on their politicians.

It was symbolic — German people have been “jerked around” too much by their politicians in the past century, he said.

Steves marveled that much of the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day, “and we’ve been trained not to care.”

“That, even if you don’t have any compassion for it, is threatening to our national security,” he said.

He suggested the United States should invest in “soft power,” essentially building goodwill among people from poor nations by providing them with necessities such as wells in their villages.

Steves made an observation t h a t c o u l d b e n e f i t t h e f i g h t against heroin use in South Florida: Public restrooms ac ross Europe are often bathed in blue light to deter heroin addicts from shooting up. The addicts can’t see their veins.

In case anyone thought Steves was snubbing the United States, he emphasized he can appreciate other cultures while respecting his own. As an example, he used a visit to a cheese shop in France, where people are “evangelical about their stinky cheese.”

“I don’t need to go home and be crazy about cheese, but it’s nice to know some people are. It doesn’t mean they’re better than us. They’re just sharing,” he said.