Read Online Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change by Andrew Solomon - Free Book Online

security, and the 9/11 hijackers were Muslims to whom visas had been granted, perhaps recklessly. I know why Farouq’s profile scared consular officers. But I also know that Farouq had helped many Americans in his homeland, and that a visit to the United States in 2002 would have strengthened his positive impression of our country. He would have returned homewith that gospel. He didn’t want to emigrate here and he didn’t want to blow up a building. He wanted to be part of the cultural exchange through which peoples come to know one another. I have more recently tried to get my gay, Libyan friend Hasan Agili a visa to come to the United States, where he could finish his medical education and help the sick and the desperate, rather than be deported to face the murderous gangs who await him at home. Such procedures have become no easier. When I was in Libya, the people I met who had an essentially pro-American stance had all studied in the United States, whereas those who were vehemently anti-American had not. This is not to say that a proliferation of student visas issued at the behest of Iowa State or UCLA will solve the world’s problems, but only that it’s hard to love a place you’ve never visited. A blanket policy of excluding visitors from “suspect” countries may ultimately damage our security, by preventing the people who would have spoken the best of us from finding out what there is to admire here beyond Baywatch .
    After the Paris attacks of November 2015, cultural exclusion was put forward as our best defense, an argument that reached its nadir in American and European attempts to disenfranchise refugees from Syria and Iraq. Leading Republican presidential contender Donald Trump proposed that all foreign Muslims should be barred entry to the United States and that even American Muslims should carry special ID cards. This cruel demagoguery is contrary to our interests. Walling ourselves off from everyone else renders us odious to those who are excluded, providing incentive for them to become radicalized. Quarantining otherness breeds in those others an ignorance of us that engenders hatred, which soon becomes dangerous. It awakens an equally dangerous hatred in us. The central proposition of this book is that circling the wagons is not only impossible in a globalized world, but finally perilous. “Seek and ye shall find,” the biblical adage holds, but seeking is an early casualty of xenophobia. We sequester ourselves not in the well-guarded, imperial palace that American isolationists fantasize but in a festering prison.
    My last book, Far from the Tree , deals with the nature of difference within families: how parents learn to cherish children who aren’t whatthey had in mind when they set out to have kids. This book is in some measure about a similar process: embracing alien points of view and ways of doing things. I wouldn’t undersell the effort involved. If accepting unlike children is tough, this is tougher. Natural instincts propel parents toward their children; natural instincts propel us away from strangers who are different from ourselves. But that doesn’t mean that we have to go down the rabbit hole of affinity groups and “safe spaces,” where people who already share opinions “protect” one another from the intrusion of other points of view. In forestalling intimacy with the vast and bewildering world, we disenfranchise ourselves, no matter how our might proliferates.
    Diplomacy is more often a skill than an instinct. We both engage with other countries because they are our allies and make them our allies through engagement. A capitalist society often defines that engagement in terms of money and military prowess, but those are inadequate models. Like all engagements, internationalism must be a rendezvous of human beings. The import of Japanese technology and Italian fashion has been gratifying; the ubiquity of Coca-Cola speaks on our behalf; and boots on the ground have increased