I beg young
people to travel. If you don't have a passport, get one. Take
a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to
Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown, eat interesting food,
dig some interesting people, have an adventure, be careful. Come
back and you're going to see your country differently,
you're going to see your president differently, no matter who
it is. Music, culture, food, water. Your showers will become
shorter. You're going to get a sense of what globalization
looks like. It's not what Tom Friedman writes about, I'm
sorry. You're going to see that global climate change is very
real. And that for some people, their day consists of walking 12
miles for four buckets of water. And so there are lessons that
you can't get out of a book that are waiting for you at the
other end of that flight. A lot of people - Americans and
Europeans - come back and go, "ohhhhhh." And the
lightbulb goes on. --Henry Rollins