Citizen of the World
Turns out that not many people believe in the world, the whole world.
I have not yet been able to insure my laptop against theft in Africa or the Middle East. Parts of it, yes. If my baggage goes missing in Casablanca or Cairo I’m ok, but if I’m in Saudi Ariaba or Israel — no joy.
First of all, it’s hard to find anyone who provides international insurance against theft of valuable electronics. You’d think “travel insurance” would be just the thing, but that industry turns out to be mostly about cancelled cruises and re-uniting plump vacationers with their lost bags. After some searching, I finally came across a company that claimed to insure laptops “worldwide”. It was cheap too, about $200 for year. Only problem was, it specifically exlcuded countries “for which travel warnings have been issued by the State Department”, as in http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/tw/tw_1764.html.
Israel is on this list. So is Indonesia, which I’ve spent months in. Okay, I’ll give them Iraq and Sudan, but Saudi Arabia? C’mon, is this insurer seriously implying that my laptop is more likely to get snatched in Saudi Arabia than in, say, Turkey, Chechnya, or Jordan?
To me, this is just ignorance. Not malicious ignorance, because this company obviously caters to business travelers who probably don’t spend much time in Darfur. It’s just that they’ve bought into the prevailing idea that the world is unsafe, because they, like most people, can’t be bothered to investigate for themselves. Let’s take the State Dept’s warning about Indonesia. It reads in part: “The October 1, 2005 terrorist attacks in Bali in which three simultaneous bombs exploded, killing 23 people and injuring more than 100, are a reminder that terrorists remain active in Indonesia.” Well, yes, that is true — but I wonder how many Americans have died in motor vehicle accidents while vacationing there.
When I visited the small town of Mizque in Bolivia, one of the locals warned my friend Alice about a pair of visitors who were in from another, neighboring town. The towns were perhaps an hour apart and each had a population of a few thousand. “Be careful of those men,†the concerned local told Alice, “they’re not from around here.â€
People, we are still living in the dark ages when no one leaves home and we fear what lies beyond our narrow horizons. We are scared, and we don’t even have balls enough to find out if our fear is rational or not. America is isolated. News coverage of other countries has fallen dramatically over the past twenty years (see this Yale study: http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=6553 ) and in the richest country in the world, 80% of the population doesn’t even own a passport.
Fuck this tribal mentality. I have no reason to believe that my particular nation-state of residence is somehow better than all the others. Where I am at any given moment is just a place, unique and special much like every other place.
Eventually, I started to find what I wanted on the web. Multinational Underwriters and International Medical Group, among others, offer medical insurance that is truly global. They’ll cover your local health-care services anywhere in the world – the whole world, really the whole world – for as long as you wish to keep paying their premium. There are similar providers in other industries too, companies who exist to serve a tiny but growing fraction of the global population who find the arbitrary divisions of territory and jurisdiction small-minded and constraining.
Although everyone comes from somewhere, it really is possible to be a citizen of the world. To be sure, there are cultural, financial, and logistical hurdles to this dream, but fear and ignorance are the real problems.
