There’s little doubt that migration has changed the world. After the human exit in the “out of Africa” scenario that saw our species populate all but Antarctica in mass migrations, people have settled and intruded upon previous settlers, overlaying culture upon culture. Today, that process takes place in three ways: 1) Physical movements of people like those of the last 60,000 years, 2) virtual migration through electronic media, and 3) temporary invasion, that is, tourism. Modern electronic interconnectedness can be just as effective a cultural influence as actual population movements. Bermuda makes the case for #2 and #3; Positano makes the case for #3. More on that later.
The Concept of Indigenous
Every place makes the case for #1. In fact, physical migration puts the idea of indigenous culture in question. How far back does one go to call a people indigenous? Modern Italians are not Romans just as Romans weren’t Etruscans or Greeks who lived on the “boot” now called Italy. But the anthropological concept off indigenous is certainly a favored one because the United States celebrates Indigenous Peoples’ Day on Columbus Day—the former originating in Berkeley in 1992, the latter a Federal holiday to mark the European intrusion on “Native Americans,” who had intruded on Clovis territory that the Clovis occupied in displacing peoples like those who inhabited the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Avella, PA, 16,000 years ago.
Nevertheless, the three migratory influences on culture have enriched as much as ditched indigenous lifestyle and values. If history is the guide, then another culture will at some unknown date either influence or replace your culture just as you or your ancestors settled in the family neighborhood. Polish Hill, Chinatown, “Dago” Heaven all replaced or intruded on the the lives of previous inhabitants. Where are the Monongahela villages today? Where are the Mound Builders of the eastern states? Certainly, those “indigenous people” did not give Moundsville, WV, its current name or build the state prison across the street from the impressive earthen mound.
Paradise Lost?
If I were as talented a poet as John Milton, I could pen a work on Culture Lost in a lengthy verse like the poet’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Unseated indigenous populations—if any group of people can be said to be truly indigenous—look back nostalgically on lost paradise, the homeland they and their immediate ancestors knew before it changed. “Lost,” however, would be the only poem I could write because, in the words of Thomas Wolfe, “You can’t go home again.” Every generation erases slightly the culture of the past and migrants erase more. Reclamation never restores what was lost or altered. At best a culture can only reminisce in annual fairs like Italian Festival, Polish Festival, Renaissance Festival, St. Patrick’s Day and the like. But in truth, that which is gone is gone. And though its founders thought to right some wrong in founding Indigenous Peoples’ Day, they haven’t united groups of peoples whose ancestry included those who warred with one another and who established their own loosely defined boundaries whose geography has been documented in territories variously named “Apache,” “Shawnee,” “Iroquois,” “Seminole,” “Huron,” and “Cherokee.”
Those festivals and days noted above are attempts to recapture lost culture, to preserve it through ensuing generations. Children, however, can move away, and those left behind inevitably die off. The analog is found in evolution. Species occupy trophic niches left empty by extinct species, wolves, for example, replacing Smilodons and dire wolves as the chief predators in a region. Look at any neighborhood’s history. The original houses remain, but their occupants are different. Polish Hill might not be dominated by people who have a Polish heritage. My own children have a diverse genetic makeup: Italian, Polish, Austrian, and Russian. The kids are as comfortable eating a meal of spaghetti as they are eating one of pirogies. And, of course, because of diverse cultural influences, tacos, shrimp fried rice, and vegetable soup. Very few cultures on an interconnected world are unitary, such is the mix made by #1, #2, and #3.
Reliving Paradise Lost
Probably few of us born in modern times would be happy with ancient life. No toilet paper, for example. No soap. No ease of transportation. No high tech, no Starbucks. Just sayin’. Would you be happy in the Golden Age of Greece, in the city Pericles made great? Visitors in Athens probably give little thought to the ice cream they eat as they tour. What was Plato’s favorite flavor?
Yet, those from other cultures seek to experience what they believe was in that culture, usually a stereotype. Stand as a tourist on the Acropolis and dream of talking to Socrates and Plato. Walk among the pillars of Karnak or ride a camel around the pyramids. You’re there, but not really. What was is gone; its essence is no more though the trappings remain like the Old State House in St. George’s in Bermuda.
Bermuda (This Is That “Later” I mentioned Getting to at the End of the First Paragraph)
Ah! Paradise! Bermuda, that British place of men in shirts, ties, and sport jackets worn with Bermuda shorts, knee socks and shined shoes and women in dresses. Kind of quaint, really. And the beauty of the place! Frozen dunes, or should I say “indurated and lithified” dunes resting on a crater’s rim with a maximum elevation at Town Hill of 79 meters (217 feet) above sea level, all the landscape bearing pastel houses with white roofs that capture rainwater in a prudent architectural admission to the island’s isolation in the salty Gulf Stream. And cleanliness. No litter on the streets and roads—at least that’s how I remember Bermuda.
But change is inevitable. As surely as those lithified dunes will eventually resume their unconsolidated form under erosive forces of wind and water, so the culture will inevitably change, subsiding into history like the supporting volcano that will slowly subside on a moving ocean crust unable to support the mountain’s weight. As sure as most old people get shorter under gravity’s inexorable pull, so Bermuda’s base will slowly sink into the sea, a process that a rising sea level can enhance as it did after the end of the last eustatic low stand 105,000 years ago.
Paradise Remembered
It’s been decades since my wife and I visited the island that annually gets about five times more visitors than the native population, a population that was at the time of our visit as literate as any country’s people. Bermuda boasted a 99% literacy rate back then, a fact that I remember after seeing several people reading paperbacks on a bus as they traveled to work in Hamilton. There was those decades ago a formality I did not experience in the neighboring melting pot of cultures called the United States. It did, however, remind me of more formal times of my childhood and even of those years as a young professor whose college president insisted on faculty wearing jackets, dress pants, shirts, and ties. (His death coincided with a creeping informality adopted by my similarly aged colleagues—I was in my mid-twenties)
That rather formal culture on Bermuda also had a low crime rate as I remember the island, a rate marred mostly by domestic incidents. Murders? Few and rare. Violent muggings of tourists? Very rare, also. Don’t misunderstand. Bermudans are human beings and as such have always had the same vices and emotions as the rest of us, including the vices of those landlocked in America’s crime-ridden inner cities. And the island population had various genetic heritages with origins as widespread as the British Isles and African Congo. It’s also long been a port for merchants and smugglers and was significant on the trade route between Europe and America, especially during the Revolutionary and Civil wars. But it became charming enough and safe enough to become a popular gun-free tourist spot in the twentieth century.
But, alas! And double alas! Maybe the island is too close to the United States and too far from its formal tie to Britain and its own isolated past that dates to a time before the Mayflower that carried Stephen Hawkins, a guy who had been shipwrecked on the island in 1609 before returning to England and then making the voyage with the Pilgrims. The Old State House in St. George’s was built in 1620, the year they landed at Plymouth Rock. Other buildings also attest to a cultural history dating to the 17th century.
As my wife and I walked the narrow roads and visited Hamilton, I saw signs that foreshadowed a cultural change.
Catapults Banned!
At the beachside hotel nestled in one of Bermuda’s many coves, there was a dress code for dinner: Reasonable dress: Sport coats and collared shirts, Bermuda shorts or dress pants. and leather shoes for men and whatever the equivalent level of formality for women, maybe dress slacks or skirts and blouses or dresses, though if memory serves me, dresses and not slacks for women. I guess that’s what is called “casual formal” or “semi-formal”—Not for me to say, since, with rare exceptions, during my entire professional career after the death of that president who hired me, I wore running shoes, jeans, and a sport coat over a T-shirt in the lab or classroom and simply swapped the running shoes and sport coat for a sweatshirt and work boots for field trips to the mountains. Yeah, when it comes to fashion, I’m neither a trendsetter nor a business suit guy. But when in Rome…er, Bermuda, I knew to dress according to the code.
Okay, though I wouldn’t want to be characterized as a slob, I can’t deny my American heritage of informality and lower Middle Class attire (thus my use of the contractions in this sentence). I became aware of my normal informality at home in retrospect as the Bermudan dress code surfaced like the island in a sea of tourist slobs. During that trip to Bermuda I saw my slobby compatriots who seemed to favor Myrtle Beach and Ocean City beachwear arrive at restaurants seemingly intent on undermining a formal culture by their dress. The contrast with Bermudans was noticeable.
And I began to think, “As the world becomes more interconnected, local codes of behavior and even local mores undergo entropy.” Fashion smooths out like the Cosmic Microwave Background, now everywhere—and I mean EVERYWHERE—at 2.7K with differences in density measured only in ten to 100 parts per million. The world was not only becoming One, it was becoming an American One in thought, fashion, and behavior. “In a couple of decades,” I told my wife, “Bermuda will be radically different. I’m happy we came to see it before it changes.”
It wasn’t just the tourists, or even just American tourists, that led me to the conjecture. I noted a youth shouldering a boom box—it was a time even before the storied Walkman and quality Bose headphones. The speakers vibrated American rap music, not obnoxiously loud, mind you, but noticeably intrusive on the scale of the island’s formality. And in the hotel, one of the few TV stations originated in Chicago; another, in Detroit. The nightly reports showed crime after crime after crime after crime in inner cities in the midst of decline. And I thought, “Of all the stations to import, why these? Why not a BBC station to the exclusion of one so different in culture?” But the ubiquitous American culture seems unstoppably intrusive on the planet. My thought intensified, “Bermuda will change.” Migrants, visitors, and electronic connectedness will effect that change.
I think I might have been prescient. Bermuda has, I believe, become more Americanized, and not in the best sense of Americanization (whatever that might be). No, the worst or, in part, the less formal part. We tourists and our culture and this country’s standards of social interaction, like people getting into fights in Disney World, have eroded Bermuda’s culture. And now, as I read online, the UK government issues this warning: “Bermuda has a moderate level of crime. There have been serious incidents, including the use of weapons.”
Weapons in Bermuda? Guns, as I indicated, were banned when I was there. The newspapers reported a few domestic disturbances, none involving firearms. But now other weapons seem to be a problem for Bermuda. I have read the list of banned items. Tourists are advised not to enter the island with air pistols, catapults, ammunition, or empty magazines. Catapults! CATAPULTS! What! Is this a Monty Python movie set? I assume that the restriction includes all forms of catapults, including trebuchets of any dimensions.
“Dear, have you finished packing for our trip to Bermuda? Remember, they don’t allow trebuchets or drugs. So, leave them at home. Possession can lead to prison sentences up to 25 years.”
“But, Gladys, you know I never travel without my trebuchet. It’s not on the TSA agents’ minds when people go through airport security, though they do a double-take when they see the large rock I carry for a counterbalance weight. No, they’re more concerned about my belt buckle and Uncle Tom’s artificial knee than my trebuchet.”
Maybe “catapult” means slingshot. I’m not sure.
Positano
Have you seen Positano? Really picturesque! Nestled—or rammed—against a rugged coast and cliffs, the place attracts tourists by the boatloads, kind of an Italian version of Santorini with narrow streets and little room to accommodate the tourist trade. So, this headline in the NY Post caught my eye: ‘Entitled’ American slammed for trashing ‘overpriced’ seaside Italian town — and ‘loud’ US tourists: ‘Girl, you f–ked up bad’ an article reporting on the brouhaha over a travel “influencer’s criticism of Positano. *
What caused the stir? Keri, the influencer who sat the heart of it, wrote, “There were just so many Americans,” she said. “It was, like, the people that weren’t well traveled, like, just loud and yelling down the tiny streets while repping their favorite football team.”
Yeah. American slobs everywhere, all eager to live for a day or a week in a place where they believe they’ll experience a lifestyle different from their own. But the Hawthorne Effect (the Observer Effect) always comes into play.
You know the effect. If people being observed know they are being observed—as people in touristy areas know—they’ll act as they think they should act. The observer changes the observed. And I assume that after millions have visited Bermuda and the Amalfi coast, they have effected a change, not necessarily for the worst, but that’s not out of the question.
Positano isn’t the quaint town it once was. It doesn’t even have the Amalfi culture it once had. It’s different because of #2 and #3, and I can’t say which is the greater influence. The world’s new found electronic interconnectedness definitely plays a part as it had played the same part the world over. I don’t know, for example, where you are. My site is visited 24/7. I can’t believe that all the wee hours of the morning readership is just East Coast. You could be in California, Hawaii, China, or Madagascar. And though you might think I haven’t had an influence on your life—good or bad—your returning for more than one of these 2,000+ essays tells me that in some small way, I have intruded on your life and, by extension, on those to whom you might have influenced on an issue I covered.
Don’t Get Me Wrong
I’m not haughtily saying I have changed the world or changed you—noticeably. But to quote Tennyson’s “Ulysses”: I am a part of all that I have met.”
Every traveler has in concert with other travelers the ability to change a destination whether by permanent relocation or by just visiting. No place has been exempt. No “indigenous” culture has been unaffected.
Think about that the next time you go on vacation. You will to some degree become a part of all you meet.
*Marissa Matozzo, April 11, 2025.
The Concept of Indigenous
Every place makes the case for #1. In fact, physical migration puts the idea of indigenous culture in question. How far back does one go to call a people indigenous? Modern Italians are not Romans just as Romans weren’t Etruscans or Greeks who lived on the “boot” now called Italy. But the anthropological concept off indigenous is certainly a favored one because the United States celebrates Indigenous Peoples’ Day on Columbus Day—the former originating in Berkeley in 1992, the latter a Federal holiday to mark the European intrusion on “Native Americans,” who had intruded on Clovis territory that the Clovis occupied in displacing peoples like those who inhabited the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Avella, PA, 16,000 years ago.
Nevertheless, the three migratory influences on culture have enriched as much as ditched indigenous lifestyle and values. If history is the guide, then another culture will at some unknown date either influence or replace your culture just as you or your ancestors settled in the family neighborhood. Polish Hill, Chinatown, “Dago” Heaven all replaced or intruded on the the lives of previous inhabitants. Where are the Monongahela villages today? Where are the Mound Builders of the eastern states? Certainly, those “indigenous people” did not give Moundsville, WV, its current name or build the state prison across the street from the impressive earthen mound.
Paradise Lost?
If I were as talented a poet as John Milton, I could pen a work on Culture Lost in a lengthy verse like the poet’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Unseated indigenous populations—if any group of people can be said to be truly indigenous—look back nostalgically on lost paradise, the homeland they and their immediate ancestors knew before it changed. “Lost,” however, would be the only poem I could write because, in the words of Thomas Wolfe, “You can’t go home again.” Every generation erases slightly the culture of the past and migrants erase more. Reclamation never restores what was lost or altered. At best a culture can only reminisce in annual fairs like Italian Festival, Polish Festival, Renaissance Festival, St. Patrick’s Day and the like. But in truth, that which is gone is gone. And though its founders thought to right some wrong in founding Indigenous Peoples’ Day, they haven’t united groups of peoples whose ancestry included those who warred with one another and who established their own loosely defined boundaries whose geography has been documented in territories variously named “Apache,” “Shawnee,” “Iroquois,” “Seminole,” “Huron,” and “Cherokee.”
Those festivals and days noted above are attempts to recapture lost culture, to preserve it through ensuing generations. Children, however, can move away, and those left behind inevitably die off. The analog is found in evolution. Species occupy trophic niches left empty by extinct species, wolves, for example, replacing Smilodons and dire wolves as the chief predators in a region. Look at any neighborhood’s history. The original houses remain, but their occupants are different. Polish Hill might not be dominated by people who have a Polish heritage. My own children have a diverse genetic makeup: Italian, Polish, Austrian, and Russian. The kids are as comfortable eating a meal of spaghetti as they are eating one of pirogies. And, of course, because of diverse cultural influences, tacos, shrimp fried rice, and vegetable soup. Very few cultures on an interconnected world are unitary, such is the mix made by #1, #2, and #3.
Reliving Paradise Lost
Probably few of us born in modern times would be happy with ancient life. No toilet paper, for example. No soap. No ease of transportation. No high tech, no Starbucks. Just sayin’. Would you be happy in the Golden Age of Greece, in the city Pericles made great? Visitors in Athens probably give little thought to the ice cream they eat as they tour. What was Plato’s favorite flavor?
Yet, those from other cultures seek to experience what they believe was in that culture, usually a stereotype. Stand as a tourist on the Acropolis and dream of talking to Socrates and Plato. Walk among the pillars of Karnak or ride a camel around the pyramids. You’re there, but not really. What was is gone; its essence is no more though the trappings remain like the Old State House in St. George’s in Bermuda.
Bermuda (This Is That “Later” I mentioned Getting to at the End of the First Paragraph)
Ah! Paradise! Bermuda, that British place of men in shirts, ties, and sport jackets worn with Bermuda shorts, knee socks and shined shoes and women in dresses. Kind of quaint, really. And the beauty of the place! Frozen dunes, or should I say “indurated and lithified” dunes resting on a crater’s rim with a maximum elevation at Town Hill of 79 meters (217 feet) above sea level, all the landscape bearing pastel houses with white roofs that capture rainwater in a prudent architectural admission to the island’s isolation in the salty Gulf Stream. And cleanliness. No litter on the streets and roads—at least that’s how I remember Bermuda.
But change is inevitable. As surely as those lithified dunes will eventually resume their unconsolidated form under erosive forces of wind and water, so the culture will inevitably change, subsiding into history like the supporting volcano that will slowly subside on a moving ocean crust unable to support the mountain’s weight. As sure as most old people get shorter under gravity’s inexorable pull, so Bermuda’s base will slowly sink into the sea, a process that a rising sea level can enhance as it did after the end of the last eustatic low stand 105,000 years ago.
Paradise Remembered
It’s been decades since my wife and I visited the island that annually gets about five times more visitors than the native population, a population that was at the time of our visit as literate as any country’s people. Bermuda boasted a 99% literacy rate back then, a fact that I remember after seeing several people reading paperbacks on a bus as they traveled to work in Hamilton. There was those decades ago a formality I did not experience in the neighboring melting pot of cultures called the United States. It did, however, remind me of more formal times of my childhood and even of those years as a young professor whose college president insisted on faculty wearing jackets, dress pants, shirts, and ties. (His death coincided with a creeping informality adopted by my similarly aged colleagues—I was in my mid-twenties)
That rather formal culture on Bermuda also had a low crime rate as I remember the island, a rate marred mostly by domestic incidents. Murders? Few and rare. Violent muggings of tourists? Very rare, also. Don’t misunderstand. Bermudans are human beings and as such have always had the same vices and emotions as the rest of us, including the vices of those landlocked in America’s crime-ridden inner cities. And the island population had various genetic heritages with origins as widespread as the British Isles and African Congo. It’s also long been a port for merchants and smugglers and was significant on the trade route between Europe and America, especially during the Revolutionary and Civil wars. But it became charming enough and safe enough to become a popular gun-free tourist spot in the twentieth century.
But, alas! And double alas! Maybe the island is too close to the United States and too far from its formal tie to Britain and its own isolated past that dates to a time before the Mayflower that carried Stephen Hawkins, a guy who had been shipwrecked on the island in 1609 before returning to England and then making the voyage with the Pilgrims. The Old State House in St. George’s was built in 1620, the year they landed at Plymouth Rock. Other buildings also attest to a cultural history dating to the 17th century.
As my wife and I walked the narrow roads and visited Hamilton, I saw signs that foreshadowed a cultural change.
Catapults Banned!
At the beachside hotel nestled in one of Bermuda’s many coves, there was a dress code for dinner: Reasonable dress: Sport coats and collared shirts, Bermuda shorts or dress pants. and leather shoes for men and whatever the equivalent level of formality for women, maybe dress slacks or skirts and blouses or dresses, though if memory serves me, dresses and not slacks for women. I guess that’s what is called “casual formal” or “semi-formal”—Not for me to say, since, with rare exceptions, during my entire professional career after the death of that president who hired me, I wore running shoes, jeans, and a sport coat over a T-shirt in the lab or classroom and simply swapped the running shoes and sport coat for a sweatshirt and work boots for field trips to the mountains. Yeah, when it comes to fashion, I’m neither a trendsetter nor a business suit guy. But when in Rome…er, Bermuda, I knew to dress according to the code.
Okay, though I wouldn’t want to be characterized as a slob, I can’t deny my American heritage of informality and lower Middle Class attire (thus my use of the contractions in this sentence). I became aware of my normal informality at home in retrospect as the Bermudan dress code surfaced like the island in a sea of tourist slobs. During that trip to Bermuda I saw my slobby compatriots who seemed to favor Myrtle Beach and Ocean City beachwear arrive at restaurants seemingly intent on undermining a formal culture by their dress. The contrast with Bermudans was noticeable.
And I began to think, “As the world becomes more interconnected, local codes of behavior and even local mores undergo entropy.” Fashion smooths out like the Cosmic Microwave Background, now everywhere—and I mean EVERYWHERE—at 2.7K with differences in density measured only in ten to 100 parts per million. The world was not only becoming One, it was becoming an American One in thought, fashion, and behavior. “In a couple of decades,” I told my wife, “Bermuda will be radically different. I’m happy we came to see it before it changes.”
It wasn’t just the tourists, or even just American tourists, that led me to the conjecture. I noted a youth shouldering a boom box—it was a time even before the storied Walkman and quality Bose headphones. The speakers vibrated American rap music, not obnoxiously loud, mind you, but noticeably intrusive on the scale of the island’s formality. And in the hotel, one of the few TV stations originated in Chicago; another, in Detroit. The nightly reports showed crime after crime after crime after crime in inner cities in the midst of decline. And I thought, “Of all the stations to import, why these? Why not a BBC station to the exclusion of one so different in culture?” But the ubiquitous American culture seems unstoppably intrusive on the planet. My thought intensified, “Bermuda will change.” Migrants, visitors, and electronic connectedness will effect that change.
I think I might have been prescient. Bermuda has, I believe, become more Americanized, and not in the best sense of Americanization (whatever that might be). No, the worst or, in part, the less formal part. We tourists and our culture and this country’s standards of social interaction, like people getting into fights in Disney World, have eroded Bermuda’s culture. And now, as I read online, the UK government issues this warning: “Bermuda has a moderate level of crime. There have been serious incidents, including the use of weapons.”
Weapons in Bermuda? Guns, as I indicated, were banned when I was there. The newspapers reported a few domestic disturbances, none involving firearms. But now other weapons seem to be a problem for Bermuda. I have read the list of banned items. Tourists are advised not to enter the island with air pistols, catapults, ammunition, or empty magazines. Catapults! CATAPULTS! What! Is this a Monty Python movie set? I assume that the restriction includes all forms of catapults, including trebuchets of any dimensions.
“Dear, have you finished packing for our trip to Bermuda? Remember, they don’t allow trebuchets or drugs. So, leave them at home. Possession can lead to prison sentences up to 25 years.”
“But, Gladys, you know I never travel without my trebuchet. It’s not on the TSA agents’ minds when people go through airport security, though they do a double-take when they see the large rock I carry for a counterbalance weight. No, they’re more concerned about my belt buckle and Uncle Tom’s artificial knee than my trebuchet.”
Maybe “catapult” means slingshot. I’m not sure.
Positano
Have you seen Positano? Really picturesque! Nestled—or rammed—against a rugged coast and cliffs, the place attracts tourists by the boatloads, kind of an Italian version of Santorini with narrow streets and little room to accommodate the tourist trade. So, this headline in the NY Post caught my eye: ‘Entitled’ American slammed for trashing ‘overpriced’ seaside Italian town — and ‘loud’ US tourists: ‘Girl, you f–ked up bad’ an article reporting on the brouhaha over a travel “influencer’s criticism of Positano. *
What caused the stir? Keri, the influencer who sat the heart of it, wrote, “There were just so many Americans,” she said. “It was, like, the people that weren’t well traveled, like, just loud and yelling down the tiny streets while repping their favorite football team.”
Yeah. American slobs everywhere, all eager to live for a day or a week in a place where they believe they’ll experience a lifestyle different from their own. But the Hawthorne Effect (the Observer Effect) always comes into play.
You know the effect. If people being observed know they are being observed—as people in touristy areas know—they’ll act as they think they should act. The observer changes the observed. And I assume that after millions have visited Bermuda and the Amalfi coast, they have effected a change, not necessarily for the worst, but that’s not out of the question.
Positano isn’t the quaint town it once was. It doesn’t even have the Amalfi culture it once had. It’s different because of #2 and #3, and I can’t say which is the greater influence. The world’s new found electronic interconnectedness definitely plays a part as it had played the same part the world over. I don’t know, for example, where you are. My site is visited 24/7. I can’t believe that all the wee hours of the morning readership is just East Coast. You could be in California, Hawaii, China, or Madagascar. And though you might think I haven’t had an influence on your life—good or bad—your returning for more than one of these 2,000+ essays tells me that in some small way, I have intruded on your life and, by extension, on those to whom you might have influenced on an issue I covered.
Don’t Get Me Wrong
I’m not haughtily saying I have changed the world or changed you—noticeably. But to quote Tennyson’s “Ulysses”: I am a part of all that I have met.”
Every traveler has in concert with other travelers the ability to change a destination whether by permanent relocation or by just visiting. No place has been exempt. No “indigenous” culture has been unaffected.
Think about that the next time you go on vacation. You will to some degree become a part of all you meet.
*Marissa Matozzo, April 11, 2025.
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