DO YOURSELF A FAVOR AND GO TO FRANCE

I've never been to France.  I've never been anywhere outside the U.S. except to Mexico, and that was just over the border.  Like lots of other people, various obligations keep me tied down to where I can't travel much.  But I dream about it, and I do the next best thing.  I study about other countries.  That all started when I started taking graduate courses in foreign governments - Latin America, Europe, Russia, and even China.  And I got fascinated with geography somewhere along the way.  These days, I do a lot of traveling through Google Earth, and my number one destination is France.  I've been interested in France for a long time, and if I were a younger, less encumbered man . . . I'd be there in short order.

I wouldn't go to France for reasons most people go.  I don't want to be part of a tour group, don't want to sample wines, eat French cooking, or anything like that.  Id be more interested in seeing the countryside, meeting the people, and checking out the historical things.  But I'd be that way about any country.  I've always been interested in New Zealand, Norway, Austria, Morocco, Italy, and Spain.  I'd go there for the same reasons - to take a close look at they way they live.  We've got the mistaken idea in this country that we're the best at everything.  The French, for instance, are better than we are at health care.  They're better at taking care of their environment, and they're better at education.  I could go on and on about stuff like that, and you could make some comparisons where we do things better than they do. 

What I like most about the French is that they aren't American ass-kissers.  We like people who kiss our asses, suck up to us, act like we hung the moon . . . and they don't do that.  Lots of Americans don't like the French for that reason.  They don't always support our military interventions abroad, and that pisses us off.  We had an organized effort going on a while back, supported mostly by right wingers, to boycott French products.  But when it started becoming apparent to American consumers as to what they'd have to give up, that boycott failed.  Like any other American, I don't like to be looked down on, but I do admire the foreigners who don't kiss our asses.  I liked Hugo Chavez for that reason.  If my American pride was so fragile that criticism from someone like Chavez got me all in a twit, I'd be less a man . . . and less an American. 

Some of my best friends don't agree with me most of the time, and that's fine with me.  They've got their thing going, and so do I.  I like the French, and if they don't, that's their problem and not mine.  Maybe if I experienced living in France for a while, I'd change my mind . . . but I don't think so.  I seldom wish I was a young man again, but on occasions I think of what I could've done and didn't.  I should've gone to France a long time ago, but I didn't, and that's my bad.  What I did do, however, was stop thinking that we here in America are tops at everything, and I didn't have to go to France to learn that.