Walking Around the World for Peace

Walking Around the World for Peace

I was diligently working on the new Vagabond Journey.com homepage when I heard a plastic faced news anchor on the television in the adjacent room blaring:

“Blah blah Garcia has been walking around the world for twenty five years.”

My ears perked up and I made a run for the television.

I found a chubby Hispanic man with some serious faced preteen peace group saying that he is walking around the world “for peace.”

Walking around the world for peace?

How?

Apparently this fellow walks into towns and tells people about how bad the world is and how everyone is starving, fighting, killing, and how they need to have concerts for peace.

For peace?

How?

Garcia had his blurb on the evening news in Bangor, Maine — he said that he was walking through the Northeastern USA for clean water in Africa, or some other such humanitarian cause.

No matter how hard I tried I could not make the connection between a Hispanic American tramping around America and anything about Africa.

How does walking in America have anything to do with water in Africa?

Oh yeah, you are telling planetary sob tales to the bleeding hearts of Maine to get them to donate their money — for peace.

It is funny to me that journeys need to be justified my pseudo-humanitarian catchphrases.

Walking around the world for peace?

Bullshit.

I am making a declaration, right here, right now:

I am going to walk around the world.

I am going to walk around the world FOR FUN.

That is right, I am going to travel on foot and HAVE FUN wherever I go.

When people ask me why I am traveling around the world, I am going to tell them:

“I am traveling around the world FOR FUN.”

For fun, is the only real justification for travel.

I know that the world is 95% OK. I know that I do not live on a planet that is a famine stricken mound of despair. The people of planet earth are 95% OK. But this well off 95% are not news. You will never hear of them — because they are OK.

I will walk with a focus on this unmentionable 95% and have FUN. I want to show, more than anything else, that the grimacing horrors that are shown across the world on the evening news is minority reporting: the 5% of horror is scraped off of the surface of the planet and displayed as a whole.

Good news is no news.

Garcia, you can walk around the world wearing a droopy face for “peace.”

I will walk beaming a smile for FUN.

Life is good.

Walking Around the World for Peace