The Startling Sameness of the World and Its People

The Startling Sameness of the World and Its People

Joe Broadmeadow

Travel sells difference. Every brochure, every airline ad, every glossy spread promises the exotic: strange food, strange music, strange gods, strange streets where nothing looks like home. We buy the ticket expecting to be strangers. We pay for the privilege of not understanding.

Then we arrive, and something else happens.

We recognize everyone.

In 2014 I walked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. People came to the footpath from everywhere, carrying different accents, ages, incomes, politics, and reasons. By the second week, the differences burned off like morning fog on a bald. Everyone wanted the same four things: dry socks, calories, water within a reasonable walk, and a roof when the sky opened. Nobody in a cold shelter in the rain asks a newcomer how he votes. He asks if the newcomer has a stove.

I have since watched the same thing happen at a larger scale, in cities and villages where I could not read the street signs. A market anywhere follows identical choreography. The vendor overstates the quality. The buyer overstates her indifference. Both know the price before either says a number. Both enjoy the performance. Change the currency, change the produce, change the alphabet on the awning, and the scene runs beat for beat like a market in New England, or a tag sale in Cumberland, or a fish counter in Providence.

Children run ahead of their parents everywhere. Parents call them back everywhere, in the same tone, at the same pitch, with the same mix of fear and irritation. I have never needed a translator to understand a mother’s voice thirty yards from a busy road.

Old men argue about politics in every country I have visited. They occupy the same chairs, drink the same small cups of something, and hold the same conviction: the current crop of leaders is the worst in history, and the young people no longer know how to work. They said it in Athens twenty-five hundred years ago. They will say it tomorrow morning in a diner on Mendon Road.

My career sharpened the observation into something closer to evidence. For twenty years I sat across from people on the worst day of their lives. Victims, witnesses, suspects, parents identifying their own children. Human beings under stress produce a remarkably narrow set of responses. Grief has no dialect. Fear has one posture. Guilt announces itself through the same small betrayals of hand and eye, whether the interview takes place in East Providence or anywhere else on the map. Deception has a grammar, and the grammar is universal.

The differences we travel to see turn out to be costume. Language, cuisine, liturgy, architecture, the particular way a culture braids its hair or buries its dead. Those differences are real, and they are beautiful, and I would not trade a single one of them for a homogenized planet. But they sit on top of a structure so uniform it borders on unnerving. Feed the child. Bury the dead. Tell the story. Distrust the neighbor’s driving. Complain about the government. Offer food to whoever walks through the door, because refusing hospitality shames the host more than the guest.

This finding is inconvenient for a great many people.

Propaganda cannot function without difference. Every atrocity in recorded history begins with a taxonomy: a line drawn, a category invented, a group renamed into something less than human. The machinery requires distance, and distance requires ignorance. Travel destroys the raw material. Once you have eaten at a stranger’s table in a country your own government has taught you to fear, the taxonomy stops working. The category will not hold. You have met the exception, and the exception has a name, and a kitchen, and a daughter who runs ahead toward a busy road.

I want to be careful here, because sentimentality corrupts good evidence.

Sameness is not a greeting card. The uniformity runs all the way down, including through the parts we would rather not claim. The same species offers you tea and shelters you from the rain. The same species builds the camps, informs on the neighbors, and looks away from the smoke. Tribalism travels as well as hospitality does. Cruelty needs no translation either. Anyone who tells you one nation holds a monopoly on decency, or on savagery, has simply not traveled enough, or has traveled with his eyes closed and his conclusions packed in advance.

The honest finding is simpler and harder: whatever people are anywhere, people are everywhere. Our capacity for kindness and our capacity for horror belong to no flag. They came with the equipment.

Which leaves the traveler with an obligation, and it has nothing to do with photographs.

If the differences are costume and the sameness is structure, then almost every argument built on the premise of fundamental otherness collapses. The politician who needs you to believe a foreign people are a different kind of creature depends entirely on your never meeting one. The whole apparatus rests on your staying home.

So go. Not for the postcards, and not for the list of countries. Go because the world will disappoint your expectations in the best possible way. You will cross an ocean looking for the exotic and find a grandfather trying to keep a two-year-old from grabbing a hot pan, and you will know exactly what he is about to say, and you will be right.

I have a photograph somewhere of a mountain in a country most Americans could not place on a map. I keep it because of the foreground. A man sits on a wall with his dog, watching people go by, looking mildly annoyed at all of them. He could have been my neighbor. He could have been me.

That is the souvenir worth carrying home. The world is not a collection of strangers. The world is one very large family with terrible communication, a long memory for grievances, and an unshakable belief in the superiority of its own cooking.