No Place

When I was six years old, I ran away from home.

I don’t remember what caused my pre-adolescent desire for emancipation from my parents. But whatever it was, I apparently decided that the grass was greener on the other side of the fence.

I told my mom that I was running away and she said, “Okay.”

That was all. No effort to talk me out of it. No list of the terrible things that could happen to a six year old kid out in the world on his own.

Just, “Okay.”

So I packed up my little cardboard suitcase and left.

I got as far as the chicken coop in the backyard. It had a roof. Straw for a bed.

I thought it was going to be perfect. I’d live out there with the chickens.

Nobody would tell me what to do or when to go to bed.

It would be paradise.

Unfortunately, a lot of people never outgrow the idea that things are better somewhere else.

They’re always looking for greener pastures. And one of those pastures is Europe.

When the rich and famous get fed up with America, they don’t pack up their suitcases and head out to live in the backyard chicken coop. They go to Europe.

They buy a chateau. Adopt a fake accent. And they make sure we all know how they are so much more progressive, cultured and enlightened than the rest of us peasants.

So, when my lovely wife and i finally got to take our trip to Italy, I wanted to see for myself this strange attraction that Europe has on some people.

Who knows? Maybe we’d get over there and never want to come back.

Our first stop was in Rome. From the airport, it didn’t look at all magical.

We took a taxi from the airport to our hotel. From the car window, it didn’t look like paradise. Or very progressive.

I don’t know what I was expecting but it sure wasn’t that every surface of the city- and I mean every surface- would be covered with graffiti.

I had two Italy travel books- two- and neither of them mentioned a single word about the urban blight in the city.

Buildings, bus stops, buses- even ancient Roman ruins were awash in graffiti.

Maybe all this talk about how Europeans were just so much more cultured than us ignorant boneheads in the US was just talk because this was not culture.

This was vandalism.

Yeah, they spoke a different language and used funny looking money but I noticed that the Italian people weren’t much different from the folks back home.

They ate and slept and were always in a hurry on their way to work. They argued politics and were selfish, pushy and rude.

Just like us.

Maybe I was just in the wrong part of the country. That must be it.

After a couple of days, we got on the train and headed south to Sorrento. Certainly this strange force that causes people to abandon their homeland must be strong there.

All the ex-pats who are so eager to slander Americans would be on the Amalfi Coast, living the good life without all of the things that were holding them back in the States.

There seem to be a lot of these disgruntled folk.

Every time there is a discussion on Facebook or Twitter about an issue in America, there’s always some bozo who chimes in about how much better things are in Europe.

“If ______ gets elected, I’m packing up and moving to Europe,” he writes. “Everything over there is better.”

I guess that’s what I was looking for. All of this ‘better’ they spoke so much about.

‘Over there’, things are just so much more progressive. There is no inequality. Men and women are treated the same. And there’s no racism, which they think is the main byproduct of America.

The schools outside of the US are always ‘better.’ Everyone wears a snappy little uniform and they all go to free college to become doctors, lawyers and physicists.

And when you finish school, your job is almost like an after thought. ‘Over there’, people only work a few hours a day. They have five months of vacation every year, and two years of maternity and paternity leave.

And of course, everyone is just so happy. Just look at all the photos of those people in Finland and Denmark. They’re all beautiful, blond, blue-eyed and smiling with the most perfect and whitest teeth you’ve ever seen.

I looked around Sorrento for this pedigreed society. After all, the Amalfi Coast is legendary for being the playground of the rich and famous.

There was less graffiti than in Rome but I didn’t see any signs of this progressive new society everyone always writes about.

Maybe they were just humble. From my experience, cultured rich people are a little stand-offish.

So I purposely struck up conversations with some of the local folks and none of them seemed to be any more cultured than I am. Okay, Italians do speak a different language, so they probably didn’t understand what I was asking them and I didn’t understand their answers, but the people I talked to didn’t seem real snobbish to me.

Maybe all the stuff about Europeans being smarter and more progressive than us Americans was just created by a PR firm somewhere. Kind of like they tried to convince us that New Coke was better than Old Coke.

Balderdash!

We took a cruise down the Amalfi Coast and it was gorgeous. It may be the most beautiful place I have ever been to and I could understand why someone might want to move there.

We were getting close to that great wellspring of culture. I could feel it.

Next stop was Venice. If I couldn’t find that enlightened society where everyone was smarter and more cultured than us American Neanderthals in Venice, well, it didn’t exist.

We got there late in the afternoon and went to visit this mythical city floating out in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.

Upon arrival, I already knew things were a little odd.

There was water everywhere and I didn’t see the first bass boat. Or the first person standing on the bank of the canal with a cane pole and jar of stink bait.

We crossed the bridge and joined about 400,000 other tourists crowded into a space about the size of my backyard.

Yeah, it was gorgeous. The old city is full of ancient churches, buildings and bridges built long before Christopher Columbus discovered America.

And I would have really enjoyed it more if there wasn’t 1,000 people in line to use the bathroom or if there wasn’t a six-mile long line to peek inside St. Mark’s Basilica.

Try as we may, we didn’t find any great enlightenment lurking around Venice, but we did get a good slice of pizza.

Our trip came to a close and oddly, we never did find this secret thing that seemed to mesmerize so many people into thinking this place was so much better than America.

As we sat in the airport, waiting to board our plane back to Georgia, I thought about how I had really expected my visit to Italy to be like going through this portal to a place where no one ever disagrees with each other, all people are treated the same regardless of where they came from, what they looked like, their sexual orientation or wealth status.

Yet, it was very similar to America. Sure, they drive weird little cars and their coffee cups are the size of thimbles, but people are just people. It doesn’t really matter where you live.

All the people who think they can just pack up and escape the horrors of America, will be gravely disappointed. It’s not our country that’s the problem, it’s us. And no matter how hard we try, we can never escape ourselves.

Just like I was when I was six and packed my little suitcase and ran away to the chicken coop.

I thought things would be so much better out there but they weren’t. My problems followed me.

By the end of the day, I tired of living with the chickens and was knocking on the back door, asking my mom if I could come home.

Italy is magical. It’s beautiful and if you ever get a chance to go, you should. But it’s no ‘better’ than America.

That’s one thing I have learned during my travels to different parts of the world. No matter how great the travel brochures and videos may look, it’s not America.

And there is no place like America.

We like to join in the lambasting of our country and complain about all the things that are wrong with the US, but the reality is that this truly is the best country to live.

Dorothy was right. There truly is no place like home.