When you travel, you realize each country
has its own Fourth of July.  It's kind of
exciting, I used to think it was just the Fourth of July but in Norway it's May seventeenth.
Here in Switzerland, August first.  France is ten days late, July fourteenth.
When you travel around
you find that everybody has their own
dream.
I was raised thinking that everyone had the American dream and then i realized that
smart people didn't have the American
dream, that's not a negative thing that's
a celebration.
In Sri Lanka, they've got the Sri Lankan
dream; it's different than my dream.
Norwegians like being Norwegian. Bulgarians
like being Bulgarian.
I've traveled a lot in Bulgaria, and I'm surprised anybody's still there.
it blows me away that people
decided decide to live their lives out in Bulgaria.
but I'm humble enough to realize that I
don't get it; they like being Bulgarian.
They might not want to live here, I might not want to live there.  It's okay.
They had a chip on their shoulder about this.
And I thought, "Okay, I guess if I ate with my fingers, I might think these guys that eat with spoons and forks
thought less of me."
but it's just
their culture.
And I gave that some serious thought for
the rest of my trip through South Asia I ate
when appropriate with my fingers,
what god intended to be used for.
and it actually got quite elegant. I would
go to fancy restaurants filled with
professional people, well-dressed people,
without a spoon or fork in sight.
fancy ceremonial sink in the middle of the restaurant; people would wash their hands and eat with their fingers.
It became quite natural.
In fact i had to be re-trained when I got home.
when you travel, you will find that
there are exciting struggles going on
today that we don't recognize.
I was raised thinking that Ethan Allen and Nathan Hale and
Patrick Henry just like, were the ultimate, right?
Guys that only wish they had more than
one life to give for their country.
and then I travelled and I learned that
these kind of guys are a dime-a-dozen on this planet.
It's not an unpatriotic thing to say,
it's just that we're not unique in having
great patriot heroes.
And every year on this planet five
languages go extinct.
No fanfare, no Green-Peace
to mourn their loss.
It's just that last person to speak that
language dies and
one little bit less of ethnic diversity
on this planet.
It's a remarkable thing. Now  a lot of, I mean 
these are such obscure little groups
that they are hardly noticed, but a lot of these groups don't go out, you know, politely
they do angry things, as they're losing their struggle.
And it's really exciting in your travels to learn
about what the struggles are in
a particular country your visiting
and then empathize with the underdogs.
Who are they're heroes?   
a very easy one to get your brain around, if you want is a contemporary hero;
 Archbishop Oscar Romero.
Of course Archbishop Romero was the
popular sort of leader of the peasants, and the
liberation theology kind of game down in El
Salvador in the nineteen eighties during
their civil war.
And he predicted that it would be
shot and killed
and he would rise again in his people.
And he was assassinated and he has
certainly risen in his people.
and I'll tell you, I've never been so inspired as to go down there and march with the 
people of El Salvador when they remember
their Nathan Hale,
who was just shot a few years ago.
A couple of, back in,
five years ago I had, I was ready for a
vacation; our family was going to go to Mazatlan,
and I was just, I needed a break.  I wanted a pristine beach; a piece of 
tropical beach. swept free of local riff-raff, just for me to relax.
And then they invited me to go to El Salvador because it was the twenty-fifth anniversary
of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar
Romero, and I told my family I'm going to be 
no fun on the beach in Mazatlan, I have got to go to El Salvador.
and uh... so they went to the beach, I went to El Salvador
covered in bug bites in a sweaty dorm,
eating rice and beans one day and beans and rice the next.
Connecting with the people of Central
America.
It was one of the richest travel
experiences I've ever had. perfectly safe,
cost half of what a vacation in  Mazatlan cost,
changed my whole life.
I mean it's not right or wrong, but
you have that option
in your travels
to go to Managua instead of Mazatlan.
I'm going to Managua for Christmas this year.
And then I'm going to go to El Salvador and then I'm going to go to Mexico City for New Year's;
it's gonna be great.
It's going to be challenging, I'll need a little
break when i get home, but I'm going to
come home having learned about you know
the biggest city in the planet and what
it's like to be on the receiving end of
globalization.
What's it like to be in a little country that no longer has its own coins? El Salvador is
dollarized.
They have got nickels and quarters. They have our presidents.
There's a Wendys on every corner now.
It's a different, there's armed guards in the
middle class neighborhoods because there's
such a gap between rich and poor.
It's an amazing story.
That most of us would be oblivious to if we weren't perverse enough
to choose to go there and learn about it.
Nobody's going to tell you about it here.
I was marching
with all the people there in El Salvador and on of the stops on that march
was a monument that
looks very much like the monument we all know and love
this is the monument in the capital
of El Salvador which is a perfect knock-off
of our Vietnam Memorial
And this granite has just as many names
carved into it
as ours does.
And each one of these people died fighting
you and me.  We killed them.
Now maybe they were Communists and we
had to kill them,
I'm not going to get into that.
The fact is they're dead, 
and we paid for the 
bullets and the bombs that killed them.
That's a heritage that these people live with.
And every day there's loved ones at this wall
thinking about their lost loved ones
and thinking about America.
It's just a poignant thing; I don't know what
conclusions to draw, but it's something
that's very real.
