Our 200-mile world

We are not the pilgrim society romanticized in movies and books, traveling the world to get to our Canterbury, or where life may lead. No one travels the country homeless on a motorcycle to get to Mardi Gras, camping in the wilderness during the night and experiencing the culture of the country. We are all tied down to our 200-mile radius of regular travel, with no self-sufficiency.

I was never allowed to camp out in the back yard because “it’s too dangerous now.” Is the world at that point more now than it was in the ’60s and ’70s? Today it seems that to go on an adventure you just get in a car and travel somewhere. That doesn’t seem like an adventure to me; an adventure should consist of some difficulty in getting to your destination. People don’t hitchhike to California to make it rich in show business. Instead, they drive there, get crushed by the corporate money-making structure that Hollywood is now and drive back home. What a copout.

There are endless amounts of media about adventure from the Vietnam era in American history, a lot of these stories concerning people our same age, trying to find the Three Gs: God, Gold and Glory. For example, “Easy Rider” tells us the story of two individuals who travel halfway across the country for gold and on the way find who they are and what the culture around them is really about. Jim Morrison was born in Melbourne, Fla., and traveled to Venice Beach, Calif., where he found out more about himself and the world than probably any college education could ever teach anyone. It may seem romanticized to say the least, but I would like to have a life adventure like these. I’d like to see the other side of the country, the vast American wastelands and cornfields of the west. I would like to travel to Europe and see Scotland or the other side of the world and see Japan.

What happened to us? I like modern technology a lot but has it taken away the life experience that we could have had years before. I’ll probably never see the places I want to see. In today’s world I can make my fortune wirelessly from my home. Get a mail-order education. I can whine about the government in a bi-weekly newspaper, or even find a mate on MySpace.

With summer pretty much here, just look out the door and think about what is out there to learn and about how many places you could work to get to and to see. From what I have been told, there is a whole world out there with things to do and millions of women to make mad enough to send me hate mail.