Why Is That Geezer Smiling?

[*** Warning***  This is another in my series of Geezerhood blogs. Instead of reading this you may want to do something more fun, like checking your investment portfolio.  Related blogs to avoid are given at the end.]

There are a lot of negative stereotypes about aging.  One of them is that most older people suffer from a variety of negative emotions, like depression, remorse, and despair as they confront the problems and challenges of aging. Old people are just not happy campers.

Like many stereotypes, this one sounds reasonable. For example, depression and sadness seem like a natural reaction to the loss of friends and family, declining physical and mental abilities, and to the contemplation of one's unfulfilled goals and dreams.  The stereotype of the sad geezer is especially strong among young people, but even older people seem to share this pessimistic view (Hummert, et. al,1994).  In fact, just reading this is making me a bit depressed.

However, there is ample empirical evidence that even though it sounds reasonable, the stereotype is wrong, and that older people report generally higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction than do younger people (Mroczek, & Kolarz, 1998; Myers & Diener, 1995;  Charles et al., 2001).  According to Laura Carstensen, a renowned researcher on aging at Stanford University, the fact that emotional well-being is actually maintained and in some ways even improves across adulthood "...is among the most surprising findings about human aging to emerge in recent years" (Carstensen et. al., 2011, p. 21).

A cynic (probably someone young) might argue that this is just another symptom of the cognitive decline of Geezerhood -- no longer in touch with reality, the oldsters are in denial and just assess everything as positive. However, Carstensen's research indicates that older people in fact exhibit both positive and negative emotions to situations, often in a more complex way than younger people do:  "...investments in meaningful activities under time-limited conditions elicit richly complex emotional experiences, such as gratitude accompanied by a sense of fragility and happiness tinged with sadness" (Carstensen et. al, 2011).

One explanation of these changes in emotional well-being across the life span is given by Carstensen's "Socioemotional Selectivity" theory of aging, which proposes that we structure our life goals partly on the basis of how relevant they are to the time we have left:

The central change in adulthood is a shift in the salience of social goals. Younger adults, having much to learn and relatively long futures for which to prepare, are motivated by the pursuit of knowledge—even when this requires that emotional well-being be suppressed. For older adults, the reverse trend appears. Facing relatively shorter futures and having already accrued considerable knowledge about others, older adults prioritize emotional goals because they are realized in the moment of contact rather than banked for some nebulous future time.
       The theory stresses that age does not entail the relentless pursuit of happiness but rather the satisfaction of emotionally meaningful goals, which entails far more than simply feeling good. Finding meaning in existing relationships, even conflictual ones, emerges as a central task in later life. (Carstensen et. al., 2000, p. 645)

So, the picture that emerges is that older people are happier overall, but also experience negative emotions in meaningful ways. I would add to Carstensen's example of relational goals a more general openness to experiencing all life events in an emotionally meaningful way, including those we probably dismissed as insignificant when we were younger.

Our young cynic, clutching at straws now, might point out that the research showing that geezers are happier than young people is "cross-sectional" in design and that so it really hasn't demonstrated that people's emotional well-being improves as they age.  It could be that the current crop of old people have always been happy, perhaps because they grew up in simpler, more supportive times.

A recent longitudinal study by Carstensen (Carstensen et al., 2011) has eliminated this possible alternative explanation by following the same group of people over a 15-year period.  The results showed that as participants in the study aged their emotional well-being improved, thus supporting the earlier cross-sectional conclusion .

So, why is that Geezer smiling?  You'll find out when you're older.

________________________________________
Related Blogs and References:

Jogging the Memory of a Geezer
Embracing Your Inner Geezer
How to Compress Your Morbidity
The Power of Negative Thinking
Thoughts for a New Year
So, What Do You Do All Day?

Carstensen, L. L., Pasupathi, M., Mayr, U., & Nesselroade, J. R. (2000). Emotional experience in everyday life across the adult life span. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 644–655.

Carstensen, L. L., Turan, B., Scheibe, S., Ram, N., Ersner-Hershfield, H., Samanez-Larkin, G. R., Brooks, K. P., & Nesselroade, J. R. (2011). Emotional Experience Improves With Age: Evidence Based on  Over 10 Years of Experience Sampling. Psychology and Aging, 26, 21–33
 
Charles, S. T., Reynolds, C. A., & Gatz, M. (2001). Age-related differences and change in positive and negative affect over 23 years. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 136–151.

Mroczek, D. K., & Kolarz, C. M. (1998). The effect of age on positive and negative affect: A developmental perspective on happiness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 1333–1349.

Myers, D. G., & Diener, E. (1995). Who is happy? Psychological Science, 6, 10–19.

Whack-A-Mole Maintenance

 My neighbor and I stood looking at the side of my house, beers in hand, admiring my latest home maintenance project.  "Looks great," he said taking a swig. But I could tell there was a lack of earnestness in his voice that meant he really wasn't sure what I had done.  Being a fellow home owner, though, he wanted to show support.

That's the way a lot of home maintenance is -- it makes problems disappear but you can only appreciate the effort if you had noticed the problem in the first place.  And preventative maintenance that heads off bigger repairs later on is even less noticeable.  It looks the same only more so.

The joys of home ownership include maintaining and fixing things constantly.  You can put this off, but you'll pay the price later in terms of expensive repairs, lots of remedial work, or a lower resale value.  So most of us either learn to use tools or we line up a stable of professionals to do the work for us.  The trouble with the second approach is that (a) pro's can be expensive and (b) they usually don't like small jobs and (c) good ones can be hard to find.

Home maintenance is a game of whack-a-mole, only in this version you pay a lot more to play and the game never ends.  Whack one problem -- say a rotted stair railing -- and another pops up, like the stair tread your foot went through while you were fixing the railing.

Then there's the "one-thing-leads-to another" phenomenon where fixing one small thing becomes a marathon of additional projects that become necessary before the small thing can be fixed -- that small repair becomes a super-sized pain in the ass.  We recently decided to have our living room carpet replaced.  Other than moving some furniture and writing a big check, this required very little on our part.  But of course we realized that before the new carpet went in, we really should re-paint the room.  And before we repaint, we really should put in a new outlet box for the tv and stereo connections.  And before we do that, we really should run a new cable through the wall for connecting the tv to the dvr.  And before we do that, we really need to install another cable splitter in the crawl space.  Etc., etc., etc.

Whack, whack, whack. whack.

A particularly irritating, vexing, and usually expensive aspect of maintenance is the "what the heck is that?" phenomenon when one repair reveals previously unknown problems of even bigger magnitude than the original.  We were once going to put it new flooring in a bathroom, a fairly simple and inexpensive project.  Removing the old flooring exposed serious rot in the wood underneath, requiring ripping out major chunks of the whole underneath structure and rebuilding it.  Hmmm.

It follows that any repair or maintenance project is bound to take way, way longer than you think.  Changing a light bulb?  Plan on several hours.  Doing some rewiring or plumbing work?  Count on days or weeks.  When I call my handy man to schedule help with a project I give an estimate of how long it will take, like "should be quick, just a couple of hours" -- the response is barely suppressed laughter.

It is easy to become despondent, frustrated and overwhelmed by Whack-a-Mole-Maintenance.  However, whenever I begin to feel this way, I remind myself that these days I should be thankful to still have a house to maintain.

Benefits of Dangerous Travel, Revisited

In a previous blog I described a recent trip to three countries in the Middle East, including Syria.  I titled the blog "Dangerous Travel" to highlight the demonstrations that were occurring in Syria at the time and the brutal crackdowns by the government.  Despite the depictions of these events in the media as widespread chaos throughout the country, my wife and I felt quite safe and were very glad we continued the trip.  At that time (April and early May of this year) the violence was in very specific areas at very specific times, posing little threat to tourists.  And most important, the target of these demonstrations was the current regime, not the governments of other countries.

Since then the internal situation in Syria has gotten steadily worse.  Larger and larger demonstrations have occurred, and they have taken place in some cities that were previously thought to be strongholds of support for the Assad regime, like Aleppo. Since we stayed in Aleppo for a few days, this caught our attention.  When we were there things were very calm, and as usual the people welcomed us warmly as they had elsewhere in Syria.  We were struck by the modern sophistication of the city and the charm of its old town area, a noteworthy feature of which was a huge Orthodox Christian cathedral next to an equally huge mosque, and a neighborhood where Burkas and knee-length dresses were evenly mixed on the streets.  The city had prospered over the years from the Assad regime's strong-arm enforcement of stability and had been rewarded for its support of the government's policies.  For demonstrations to occur here was a striking sign of the erosion of Assad's power. 

A second place we visited that is currently in the news is the smaller city of Hama, a picturesque place known for its ancient waterwheels throughout town that are used to draw water from the town river.  We enjoyed it very much, and again we are startled by the contrast between the quiet, seemingly calm place we saw and the images of it as the center of demonstrations by 100,000 anti-government protestors and violent reprisals by Assad's armed forces.  This is the town where Assad's father killed an estimated 10,000 or more in earlier uprisings about 30 years ago.  As detailed in an informative article by Al Jazeera, the recent events began to take place just days after we were there.

Finally, there are the demonstrations in Damascus and the storming of the French and American Embassies there.  These events are chillingly different because they seem to have been sponsored or at least encouraged by the government in response to the visit to Hama by the French and American Ambassadors.  The claim -- without foundation from everything we saw -- is that the anti-Assad demonstrations that have been going on for months now have been instigated by these foreign governments.  Our interpretation is that this is a very desperate attempt by Assad to legitimize his brutal crackdowns in the eyes of his dwindling supporters.

Is it now too dangerous to travel to Syria?

Prior to our trip my answer to this question would have been a quick "Yes."  After traveling there, meeting the people who are the targets of their government's brutal retaliation, and seeing firsthand the disconnect between filtered media versions of events and the reality we experienced, I'm not so sure.  But I think what would now keep me from going is the change in the government's attitude toward foreigners from being objects of  economic exploitation to scapegoats for justifying brutality.  If a government is willing to use tanks and machine guns to quell peaceful demonstrations and kill thousands in the process, it might not care about a protecting a few tourists.

Misperceiving Wealth in America

How is wealth in America distributed?  We're a capitalist country so a certain degree of inequality is justified and appropriate. After all, a major motivational advantage of the wealth-generating power of capitalism is that it allows some people to amass a greater portion of a country's wealth than others.   But just how unequal is the distribution in America today? How accurately do people perceive the inequality? How close is the current distribution to what we might consider ideal?

Harvard Business School Professor Michael Norton and Duke Psychology Professor Dan Ariely have recently published a study that examines these questions (Norton & Ariely, 2011).  The results are timely, given the recent debates over our budgetary crisis and economic policies, and are likely to be very relevant for evaluating the election rhetoric that is already beginning to heat up.  Although our political leaders clearly disagree on the question of ideal wealth distribution,  it isn't at all clear what ordinary people think nor how much agreement there is among them.  Nor is it clear how accurately ordinary Americans perceive the current wealth distribution in America.

Norton & Ariely surveyed 5,522 Americans who were representative of the population in terms of income, voting record, gender, and state of residence.  The careful nature of their sampling technique allows confident generalization to the larger population.

The study revealed that people are generally pretty inaccurate in their perceptions of the actual distribution of wealth in America, tending to believe that wealth inequality is less than it really is.  For example, the richest 20% of Americans actually own 84% of the wealth, but people estimated they own just 59%.  For the middle 60%, where most of us fall, the actual amount owned is only 15%, but people think it is much higher, about 37%.  Estimates regarding the poorest 20% of Americans were most accurate -- they actually own less than 1% of the wealth, but people think they own 5%.  Although there were slight differences in the estimates among demographic groups based on personal wealth, party affiliation, and gender the level of consensus was very high -- inaccuracy was not much greater in one group than another.

In terms of their ideal distributions of wealth, there was a clear tendency to accept a certain degree of inequality, but to prefer a level that is much less than currently exists.  For example, in people's ideal distribution the wealthiest 20% would own 32% of the nation's wealth, a rather lower figure than the 84% they actually own, and the poorest would own about 11%, not the .1% they actually do.  For the middle 60% the ideal was 57%,  a dramatically higher figure than the 15% actually owned by this group.  Again, income level, party affiliation, and gender were associated with only small differences in ideal figures.  Compared to their estimates of current inequality,

All groups—even the wealthiest respondents—desired a more equal distribution of wealth than what they estimated the current United States level to be, and all groups also desired some inequality—even the poorest respondents. In addition, all groups agreed that such redistribution should take the form of moving wealth from the top [20%] to the bottom [60%]. In short, although Americans tend to be relatively more favorable toward economic inequality than members of other countries (Osberg & Smeeding, 2006), Americans’ consensus about the ideal distribution of wealth within the United States appears to dwarf their disagreements across gender, political orientation, and income. (Norton & Ariely, 2011)

In contrast to the conservative view voiced by congressional politicians who want us to believe that the historical trend in America has been for greater and greater advantage being given to those in lower economic brackets, resulting in overpaid workers, bloated welfare programs and an entitlement society, the reality is that inequality favoring the most wealthy has been steadily increasing, particularly since 1970.  Evidence for this is powerfully presented in a very informative interactive graphic recently published online by The Washington Post.  I urge you to look at these data yourself, but in the meantime I'll offer the Post's summary regarding income distribution in the US:  "Inequality in the U.S. has grown steadily since the 1970s, following a flat period after World War II.  In 2008, the wealthiest 10 percent earned almost the same amount of income as the rest of the country combined (my italics)."  These wealthiest 10 percent are those whom the Republican/Tea Party leaders are willing to defend to the point refusing to consider any budget that would lead to higher taxes on the rich, and in fact have proposed lowering taxes on corporations and on people in the highest income brackets, despite the fact that their tax rate is lower than it has been for most of the past 100 years.

This does not seem like a strategy that might get us closer to most people's ideal distribution of wealth in America. 
___________________________________
Related Blogs:

Punishing the Victims
Terminate Me, Please
Does Size Really Matter?
Tax Tips for Tea Time
The Real Lesson from This Election
These Will Be "The Bad Old Days"

"Lei"zy Horses and Hot Malasadas

There are a number of annual events that make living in Hawai'i very enjoyable.  One I have already written about is the awe-inspiring Ironman Triathlon.  Several others are more celebrations of local culture and history that primarily involve residents, though visitors lucky enough to be here when they occur will also find them to be a unique treat.

One is the yearly parade in honor of King Kamehameha I, the Hawaiian monarch who unified the islands into one kingdom in the late 1700's and ushered in a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity.  Kamehameha was born on our island, and so there is a special local connection to this celebration, which is held state-wide each June. 

Pa'u Riders

The parade route is along part of Ali'i Drive, a waterfront street that passes through the quaint business area of Kailua-Kona.  The backdrop is the crystal clear blue Pacific 50-100 feet away and lining the route are palms, banyan trees, colorful bougainvillea, plumeria, orchids, and other assorted varieties of tropical greenery.  In the golden morning sunlight the scene is eye-poppingly beautiful.

Princess and Two Escorts

The special feature of the parade are eight groups of Pa'u horseback riders, each representing one of the main Hawaiian islands.  Each group consists of a princess and her attendants, plus several male outriders or escorts, all of them (including the horses) wearing the colors and flowers of the island they represent. The word Pa'u means "skirt" and refers back to the tradition started in the 1800's for women riders to wear long flowing skirts to protect their fancy clothing when they were riding to a party or celebration.  The flowers are incorporated into leis and hatbands and are appropriate to the island -- for our Hawai'i Island the riders wear red and the flowers are lehua blossoms woven into leis of maile and other ferns.  The horses wear leis, too, and usually bands of flowers in their harnesses.

Horses have been in Hawaii only for about 200 years.  They were introduced in 1803, when a mare and foal were brought by Richard Cleveland as a gift to King Kamehameha I.  Hawaiians had of course never seen such an animal -- the only mammals in the islands until humans arrived were the monk seal and an indigenous species of  bat.  The Hawaiians introduced dogs and pigs from Polynesia  (and maybe accidentally the palm rat), and in 1793 Captain George Vancouver presented King Kamehameha I with 5 black longhorn cattle. The cattle multiplied wildly, and in 1832 John Palmer Parker worked with King Kamehameha III to bring Mexican vaqueros with riding and roping skills to help with his booming cattle ranching business.  The vaqueros adapted well to Hawaii, where they were called paniolos (a Hawaiian interpretation of "espanol"), and introduced the cowboy culture here even before it was developed on the mainland U.S.  Of course here the cowboys do the hula instead of the two-step.  In the early 1900's Portuguese immigrants were recruited as ranch workers and they added their own cultural flavor to the mix, including the invention of the ukelele.

Poop Patrol

A parade with nearly a hundred horses is going to generate considerable fertilizer.  One of the cutest parts of the parade are the teams of pooper-scoopers that follow each of the Pa'u units.  They pull small wagons often decorated as colorfully as the Pa'u groups, and the scoopers do their job with a humorous flourish.  For example, this year the team following the riders representing Koho'olawe, a small island off the coast of Maui that was used for many years by the U.S. military as a bombing range, called themselves "The Bomb Squad,"  a double nod to the historic military reference and to the still-steaming missiles on the street. One of my favorites a few years back was a group whose highly decorated poop wagon had a large sign saying "Hot Malasadas!"  We residents in the crowd had to explain to visitors that malasadas are Portuguese doughnuts, a delicious favorite pastry found in bakeries all over the island.

For me the parade captures the character of Hawai'i very well:  A mix of Hawaiian, European, Asian, and Polynesian cultures displaying the complexity and diversity of influences on our history,  all in a physical setting that is hard to match.

Punishing the Victims?

[***Warning***  This blog contains material known to be toxic to the majority of members of the House of Representatives.]

Okay, let me get this straight.  The Republican/Tea Party's plan to solve the country's economic problems is to lower taxes for corporations and the wealthy while simultaneously cutting spending for social programs, such as Medicare, Transportation, Education and welfare assistance.  The conservative approach would also give corporations a boost by repealing an act that requires companies receiving federal contacts to pay workers at least at the level of prevailing local salaries and benefits.  This would allow those companies to pay workers less than they do now.  In short, we should increase the income of corporations and the wealthy but cut the income and benefits of middle and lower class workers.  Hooookay.

Doesn't this strategy put the burden for fixing the economy on the people who are suffering the most from the current recession?  That is, the ordinary people who are losing their houses, their jobs, and their health care?

The Republican/Tea Party argument is that the maximum marginal income tax rate (currently 35%) is the main obstacle to economic recovery and that cutting it would stimulate growth and reduce unemployment.  The wealthy would then have even more money to spend, which would trickle down to the less-wealthy, and corporations would have more funds to invest in expansion and hiring.   Sounds good, except there are some very large holes in this argument.

First, the current maximum tax rate is actually lower than it has been for most of the past 100 years, including periods when our economic situation has been far better than it is now.  There is simply no credible evidence that this rate is tied to economic growth.

Second, no one actually pays the highest rate.  Being a marginal tax bracket means that it applies only to income above a certain level, not to all the income of a person or corporation.  And it is levied only after all tax breaks and deductions have been applied, resulting in a much lower effective  tax rate.  For large corporations this is about 25% and for the wealthy about 18% on average.  For small businesses, according to the SBA, the effective range is from 13% to 27% depending on how they are structured.  And many corporations pay little or no tax at all. For example, in 2010 GE had a profit of  $5.1 billion and paid no Federal income tax, and is expected to have only a small tax bill again for 2011 (for an analysis of how they do this, see Forbes or Reuters). From 2008 to 2010 General Electric Co, American Electric Power Co Inc, DuPont Co and nine other companies had a negative 1.5 percent tax rate on $171 billion in profits according to a study reported by Reuters.

Third, a more direct way of linking tax rates to the nation's economic productivity is to calculate the percentage of taxes relative to the Gross National Product.  As economist Bruce Barlett notes in a recent NYT article:

By this measure, federal taxes are at their lowest level in more than 60 years. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that federal taxes would consume just 14.8 percent of G.D.P. this year. The last year in which revenues were lower was 1950, according to the Office of Management and Budget.The postwar annual average is about 18.5 percent of G.D.P. Revenues averaged 18.2 percent of G.D.P. during Ronald Reagan’s administration; the lowest percentage during that administration was 17.3 percent of G.D.P. in 1984. In short, by the broadest measure of the tax rate, the current level is unusually low and has been for some time. Revenues were 14.9 percent of G.D.P. in both 2009 and 2010.

I readily admit that sacrifice and budget cuts are necessary to get us out of the economic mess we are in.  But to me the burden has to shared by everyone,  rather than mostly by those who can least afford it.  To cut spending and increase revenue through taxes and/or closing tax loop holes on corporations and wealthy Americans isn't being unreasonably progressive -- it's just fair.

The Benefits of Dangerous Travel

How do you know when you're in danger?  Sometimes it seems perfectly clear:  a truck barreling down on you as you cross a street;  hiking on a narrow ledge with a 500-foot fall;  a nervous mugger pointing a gun at you; an angry mob around you chanting anti-American slogans when you are in a foreign country.  In these examples the imminence of harm and the source of the threat are certain and unambiguous.

But many times assessing danger requires making an inference, an attribution, or an interpretation that isn't so clear.  As we begin to cross a street, we make inferences regarding the local norms involving drivers versus pedestrians and the likelihood a car or truck will yield to us.  When we encounter a high ledge while hiking we look at its riskiness based our assessment of our physical abilities and experience in comparable situations.  In planning a trip abroad we judge the likelihood of being the target of resentment or anger in a foreign country based on current news reports and personal accounts of other travelers.  We usually feel confident that we have correctly determined the threat or danger -- that we know whether we are in danger -- but in truth we have only really guessed.

I wrote last February that my wife and I were considering going ahead with our plans to visit the Middle East, despite the turmoil there (see my blog of February 15th) .  We did indeed make the trip, and recently returned from a month in Jordan, Syria, and Egypt.  We were there from April 12 to May 12, during the regional upheaval journalists and politicians have now dubbed the "Arab Spring"  or "Arab Awakening" (I suppose these are appropriate labels, but in this case Springtime and Awakening are associated with bullets, tanks, and firebombs).  We certainly hadn't planned to be involved in these momentous events, and new developments along the way forced us to assess danger far more than normal in our travels:  protests in Syria intensified and so did the brutal government crackdown on them;  just as we were about to enter Syria, the Jordan/Syria land border was closed, though it was still possible to fly between countries, which we did;  shortly after entering Syria the U.S. State Department issued a warning advising U.S. citizens to leave the country immediately (we didn't);   in Libya the UN stepped up its military action against the government; about halfway into our trip Osama Bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces; while we were in Egypt there were violent clashes between Christian and Muslim groups.

Were we in danger?  You might infer from the list of events above that we were standing in the middle of the street with a truck barreling down on us -- the clearly harrowing situation I suggested at the beginning.  And to be honest, if all these things happened right before we left home we might have cancelled.  But we're now convinced that would have been a mistake, that we were in fact not in significant danger, and that whatever level of risk present was far outweighed by the positive benefits of the trip.

We weighed the information we received from news sources and from the State Department along with our own direct observations, which contrasted sharply. Everywhere we went people of all walks of life, ages, and social position were genuinely welcoming and friendly -- particularly when they found out we were Americans.  Although we stood out like sore thumbs (it is not possible to blend in there, especially when you're two of only a handful of tourists), we never felt like targets of resentment or anger.  Naturally our inferences might have been wrong, but the probability of our misjudgment has to be considered in the context of 40 years of mostly independent travel that has exposed us to a variety of social situations and interactions requiring us to assess the sincerity and honesty of people's motives.  Based on that experience, we have to regard this as one of the safest trips we have ever taken and probably one of the most enjoyable.

Some of you reading this may wonder why we would travel to a place where there is even a chance of danger -- what's the great attraction that makes the inconvenience and potential hassles worthwhile?  This is tough to answer. In response to a good friend who challenged our motivation for this trip, I said that our rewards for travel here were the same as they always have been for us:  acquiring a deeper understanding of different cultures, including those under the thumb of notorious, disgusting regimes; seeing first-hand the layers of history embodied in the art and architecture of past civilizations and current societies;  appreciating the ecology and geology of other parts of the world.

Paul Theroux put it a bit more eloquently in a recent NYT article on traveling during turbulent times, and I'll close with his words:

"In the bungling and bellicosity that constitute the back and forth of history, worsened by natural disasters and unprovoked cruelty,  humble citizens pay the highest price. To be a traveler in such circumstances can be inconvenient at best, fatal at worst. But if the traveler manages to breeze past such unpleasantness on tiny feet, he or she is able to return home to report: 'I was there. I saw it all.' The traveler’s boast, sometimes couched as a complaint, is that of having been an eyewitness, and invariably this experience — shocking though it may seem at the time — is an enrichment, even a blessing, one of the life-altering trophies of the road. 'Don’t go there,' the know-it-all, stay-at-home finger wagger says of many a distant place. I have heard it my whole traveling life, and in almost every case it was bad advice. In my experience these maligned countries are often the most fulfilling."