Travel Musings

We’ve had the opportunity to travel more than usual over the last year within the US. We’ve touched on 24 states and counting with multiple cities in most. Because the journeys have been work related, they’ve taken us into a vast cross section of food pantries, grocery stores, pharmacies, executive offices, churches, newsrooms, convention halls, film sets, local eateries and performance venues. All to say this has gifted us conversations with a heretofore not experienced variety of fellow citizens. This privilege has and is affording us a series of snap shots and observations. Some heartening, some shocking… all educational. I’ll start with the heartening.

THE UPLIFT

There is a vast army of selfless do good-ers helping the needy that is alive and well and about their business in America. Because my partner and I run a small bread company that gives all our profits to food scarcity we’ve been able to meet with…well, I’ve lost count now of how many food scarcity support efforts. Suffice to say not less than ten. The people at these institutions have included drivers, cooks, executives, meal packers, fork lift drivers, volunteers, teachers. Each… and scout’s honour this is not an exaggeration… has been joyful, resilient, inclusive, hopeful. The only other community in which I have encountered this holistic spirit of selflessness, is with hospice. They show up often at predawn hours to chop, stir, bake, sort, usually under fluorescent lights and on concrete floors. Those we’ve met at any one facility collectively make anywhere between 500-3500k meals a day…and do so on a budget of $2-4 per meal, labour included. They often use their own vehicles and gas to get the food to where it needs to go. Although their duties do not require them to do so, these do good-ers will walk the pets if the owner can’t, bring in the mail, shovel the snow, hold a hand, listen to a story, become a life line to the outside world. Many in this army have themselves been on the bread line, or are one life event away from being there. Hearing some of their stories I now realize in fact, we all are. It’s almost been like rediscovering Santa Claus. He exists and year round. In stark contrast to much of the willful blindness and greed we see going on in the world today, the good, true and kind in humanity is real and robust and saving lives.

THE SHOCKING

In America, 90 billion tons of food goes into land fill…annually. 30% of the college population rely on food support systems in order to eat. One in seven adult goes hungry. One in five child. 70% of children in K-12 are hungry. Since February of 2025, financial support to food scarcity efforts have, in places, been cut as much as 95%. Gas prices have shot up since the downbeat of the war America initiated with Iran. Amongst a myriad of other things, this has impacted the costs to food delivery systems by as much as 40%. 1/3 of the food grown in America does not make it to market. Another fun fact…over 100k families in Indianapolis alone make too much to qualify for government support but not enough to feed their families. Here’s another…90% of students in the LAUSD system rely on the school lunch program to be fed at all. I do not have statistics on this but I’ve spoken to over 9 elementary school teachers who buy food for their students out of their personal funds. Many serving in the military today rely on food pantries in order to feed their families. With price hikes, many food support systems have not been able to afford eggs, fish or meat for their clients over the last 10 months.

As of last December there was a verified measles count of three thousand in the greater Houston area as well as six cases of polio. This is not in Haiti or Gaza. This is in America.

THE GLOBAL

I’m fortunate to have some very accomplished, very smart friends whose careers boast lists of achievements light years beyond my capacity. Basically, our friendships consist of them talking and me sitting with my mouth hanging open. Their careers range from astrophysics to cyber to international finance, intelligence, diplomacy, to the world of medicine, research and beyond. On these travels, I’ve sought them out and, in some cases, have succeeded in getting together for whatever debrief they’ve been willing to offer. Here are some bullet points of these chats: China has more than 170 ambassadors serving around the world. America now has less than 85. There is, for instance, at this moment no US ambassador to Germany. During the last two years of the first Trump admin there was no US ambassador to Japan. This unprecedented castration of diplomatic arts has provided our rivals, China for one, with an open field.

Defunding of USAID, which began approximately in March 2025, has caused an estimated 722,000 deaths, children accounting for 500,000 of that total. Besides starvation, the primary causes have been HIV/AIDS, diarrhea, malaria, pneumonia, and tuberculosis. Projected numbers, should these funding sources not be restored, are estimated at 14 million to 23 million deaths by 2030. That was before we heard of the developing outbreak of Ebola in the Congo and Uganda. America currently experiences between 100-200 covid related mortalities per month. In my book that makes for a whole lot of angry mothers. Watch out.

We didn’t need to go into war against Iran. As one high ranking/retired military officer explained, “Our nerds are better than their nerds.” We have the capacity, for instance, to hack and therefore block any nuclear attack Iran might think to instigate. There is a new regime in place in Iran now…one far more conservative than the previous and one that no longer holds the Houthis at bay. Provisions to safeguard our US military on the ground in the middle east have not yet been put in place. As one former marine described it, the troops on the ground there “are sitting ducks.”

I suspect, dear reader, that all of those feel like gut punches to you as well.

THE HORIZON

On balance, my village, the small collective I’m able to tap into, have taken heart from the elections in Hungary. In broad strokes, they feel things are likely to get worse before better, however, there is a confidence that the elections will hold and the current ne’er do wells will be resoundingly ousted. I wish I had their confidence. I am hearing some fresh perspectives and framings that are serving as potential reset buttons and I take heart in them. Marjorie Taylor Green’s voice has now been amplified to a degree by Tucker Carlson’s new tune. Didn’t see that coming. Jason Crow and Pete Buttigeg are young, credentialed, firm but not combative and are working hard to engage in fruitful conversation and proactive solutions. Then there is the brilliant James Talarico.

Will truth make a comeback? Will we strike a balance with living authentically and enjoying the fruits of AI? Will the center hold? Glancing back over our travels I can handily bear witness to a resounding echo of the good in our fellow citizens. Of kindness and compassion. Also of an incredible work ethic that is about far more than greed. Because I have witnessed this, felt it viscerally, I am hopeful the tide will turn…that rational thought will prevail. That’s a good starting place…good clay to work with.

I watched the NASA press conference just after the splash down of Artemis II…the first to speak was an Amit Kshatriya. NASA Associate Administrator. About 3/4 of the way through his comments, he said: The impediment to action is where we find the way to get to action. What stands in the way, becomes the way.

If this is so, we must look our flaws square in the face and continue to labor to overcome both as individuals and in the collective. I don’t have anything else better to do. Do you?

A War Un-won?

In 1993, I had the chance to visit Vietnam. I’d been doing a film in Thailand and with a few days off decided to head north heeding the advice of an experienced traveller to Hanoi “Before,” she said, “it was ruined.”

A quick hop and there I was, in Hanoi, a place for which I had plenty of references but in which I had no tangible experience. I had after all lived through the Vietnam War. Sat bedside in Tokyo army hospital burn wards in my teens along with my class mates writing letters for bandaged soldiers barely older than we were. My cousin had served two tours in ‘Nam, our local paper the Tokyo Stars and Stripes kept us abreast of the horrors, the Foreign Correspondents Club at which my folks were members was always full of seasoned, hard drinking journalists fresh off the fields. I had heard stories of the Hanoi Hilton, attended a talk given by Jane Fonda on the heels of her trip to Hanoi. Shell shocked soldiers on R&R often stayed in our home from 1967 to 1972.

Hanoi was nothing like what I had imagined…and nothing like it is today. 1995…streets were bustling with yaks, bicycles and the occasional car weaving through each other indiscriminately. Street vendors flourished, I stayed in the most posh accommodation of the time..a Soviet built hotel that had wax toilet paper. I remember feeling as if I was on two trips at the same time. One…to an exquisite new country filled with hard working farmers in a moment of great transition. The other, to the country that had been our enemy and to which too many young Americans had been sent never to return. In the sweltering heat, dressed as I was in flip flops and a sun dress, sweating profusely, I tried to imagine what the experience could have been for a young man from say Nebraska who had never been out of his own county and now half way around the world from everything he had ever known, stepping off his first plane ride, weighted down with gear, risking all to battle the ‘spread of communism’ whatever that meant. Then after all that…to have lost the war. Waste upon tragedy upon lunacy.

On the heels of that mind bending trip, I was introduced to a Thai businessman, Stanford grad, man of the world who laughed at my depressed reaction to Hanoi. “Oh you Americans!” he laughed. “You always think you lost the Vietnam War. You didn’t! You won!” A pretty astonishing declaration. His reasoning was that prior to the war, the Sino-Soviet pact was rock solid and eyeing India as a further frontier for business expansion. America, terrified to loose the wild west of opportunity, set about to break the pact…and that successfully done, exited Vietnam. History has gone on to prove my Thai friend right in the sense that in spite of the US having “lost the war”, Vietnam is anything but communist and a now a hot bed of commercial opportunities and growth for western entrepreneurs among others.

I read in the news today that Putin is hosting Modi, Xi and Erdogan. Kim Jong-un is expected to attend as well, each with a posse of businessmen. Putin is looking to “consolidate solidarity” and build a “new type of international relation and business community away from an unreliable and punitive America.”

So…having “won” the Vietnam War 50 years ago it is possible that it will be un-won over these next few years. China and Russia are united in looking to solve India’s recent tariff wound at the hands of the person occupying the White House. Looking to create partnerships in commerce and invention. We are already collectively 80% behind China’s alternative energy industry. Reading of this extraordinary gathering I shudder to think where else we will soon be lagging.

Virginia Calling

My dog got hit by a car a few years back. She survived, mercifully with only a broken leg to show for the misadventure but it meant that rather than fly home to Colorado from the east coast, we would need to drive. I had the time, it was summer…so, off we set. Our route took us through the stunning, ancient hills of Virginia and West Virginia, land of my matriarchal ancestors. Looking at those vistas, I remember some internal switch being involuntarily flipped that cued a calling to return to those roots. Who knows why? Over the course of my life, I had only been in those parts for a handful of scattered weeks but then again, I had grown up under my Mother’s roof and for as much as her life had evolved beyond West Virginia, there was a part of her that always remained deeply grounded in those sensibilities. She could as easily wear an haute couture, gold lamé gown dripping in jewels as she could smack the shit out of an errant rattler in the backyard with the flat side of a shovel.

Recently, when an offer came in to do a movie in Virginia, I jumped at the chance to return. So here I have been this last summer week, in these unfamiliar, familiar parts. As that flipped switch had harbingered, I have been having some kind of serious series of woo woo moments since arriving. For one thing, the vegetation is much of what Mom had duplicated in my sister’s and my Tokyo childhood gardens …gardenias, camellias, lilacs, azaleas…all of which are in bloom now. Childhood aromas abound. The decor in the house the film company has me staying in, as well as the residence in which we’ve been filming, eerily repeat choices of Mom’s/my guess is my grandmother Mamaw’s, as well. Silver trays, tassels on knobs, worn tapestry carpets, silver candle sticks, sea shell and drift wood collections, wicker backed chairs, etched glass bowls, cut crystal vases, arrangements of dried pussy willow stems and peacock feathers. Shades variously of blue gray, taupes and muted coral on the walls and linen, lots of monogrammed linen. These are each elements of décor I have adopted into my own homes but had heretofore never particularly identified them as hand me down influences from my matriarchs. Then…oddly…there are Asian accents as well. Massive peony patterned porcelain jars. Blue and white rice jars. The Asia connection continues as my driver, in this teeny tiny Virginia hamlet is of all things, Japanese. So random…then again not? The Spirits are working some kind of wicked pull to my past and to my ancestors and I’d be lying to say I am not a little comforted by it all. Speaks somehow to the quantum interconnectedness between past present and future… All as being one.

Inevitably somewhere in the day this reverie gets interrupted by yet another punch from the news. You know, those government, blow up punches. The eradication and/or defunding of the EPA, Department of Education, NIH, PBS, NPR, vaccine and cancer research, USAID, etc… Tragically, the list goes on. My sense of identity as an American, cracks anew. I mean what does it mean to be an American anymore? We certainly do not stand today for any of the values my generation was raised to emulate. The path ahead as citizen again becomes fraught, unstable. Thus frozen but in the newfound comfort of Virginia, I turn willingly, to the past. As if to reassure myself that because I, we, have a past we indeed do have a future.

In an attempt to re-root in the vanishing America I love, I’ve taken to wading through the Constitution and have found solace. It spells out clear directives and duties of each branch of government, displays evolving humanity, compassion, lawful procedure, separation of powers, separation of church and state. Thus re-rooted, when yet another flagrant action of total disregard for our Constitution is perpetrated, it is easier to undo my ingrained trust of government, call out the wrong, reset the trajectory if only mentally and realign with my, with our ancestors’ wisdom. I breathe in the Virginia aromas anew and listen for life cues. Whilst I wait…I imagine I feel or perhaps even feel an embrace from the past encouraging me and all of us onwards.