Eisenhower on USA Travel: a Self-Education

In 1955, USA President Eisenhower, the son of a pacifist Jehovah's Witness, delivered a speech on travel. Eisenhower lamented not being able to travel more and likened domestic travel to self-education about people. Reading his speech made me realize the average person today has the ability to travel more conveniently than a former head of state and at affordable rates. It also made me realize how far USA has traveled away from its core principles, principles once so clear, a president could speak the words below without irony or naiveté. 

Actually, I came here just to see you--to see people. I want to know you better. There are certain things I do know about you. I know that Americans everywhere are the same, in their longing for peace, a peace that is characterized by justice, by consideration for others, by decency above all, by its insistence on respect for the individual human being as a child of his God...

We know we must not sacrifice principle for mere expediency. But do we know also that the responsibility is on us to attempt to understand others as we think they should understand us? Do we even make the mistake of assuming that the rest of the world knows us, knows our peaceful intentions, knows that we want nobody else's land, nobody else's rights, that we covet nothing? ... 

I come to you, not only to understand you better, but to ask you only to support, always, those principles, to think of them and to expand them in your own mind into method, as to how we shall do it; and then you will always make your own contribution to the peace of the world, so that our sons may stay at home, the products of our toil may be used for our schools and our roads and our churches, and not for guns and planes and tanks and ships of war.

Though Americans are currently in the middle of a pandemic, they know they will travel again. I wonder, though: do they know their ancestors made it possible for them to travel worldwide, and do they understand their ancestors' reasons for making the world safe for travel? 

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (February 2021)