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Rick Steves' Travel as a Political Act Blog

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Other countries have struggled to become more "social-istic," like Denmark...and failed. So how do the Danes pull it off?

I think their success relates to their acceptance of their social contract. Any society needs to subscribe to a social contract — basically, what you agree to give up in order to live together peacefully. Densely populated Europe generally embraces Rousseau's social contract: In order to get along well, everyone will contribute a little more than their share and give up a little more than their share. Then, together, we'll all be fine.

The Danes — who take this mindset to the extreme — are particularly conscientious about not exploiting loopholes. They are keenly aware of the so-called "free rider problem": If you knew you could get away with it, would you do something to get more than your fair share? The Danes recognize that if everyone did this, their system would collapse. Therefore, they don't. It seems to me that the Danes make choices considering what would happen to their society (not just to themselves) if everyone cheated on this, sued someone for that, freeloaded here, or ignored that rule there.

In contrast, the United States subscribes to John Locke's version of the social contract: a “don't fence me in” ideal of rugged individualism, where you can do anything you like as long as you don't hurt your neighbor. Just keep the government off our backs. In some ways, this suits us: As we have always had more elbow room, we can get away with our “rugged individualism.” Thanks to our wide-open spaces, determination to be self-sufficient, and relative population sparsity, it's easier — and arguably less disruptive — for us to ignore the free rider problem.

If I had to identify one major character flaw of Americans, it might be our inability to appreciate the free rider problem. Many Americans practically consider it their birthright to make money they didn't really earn, enjoy the fruits of our society while cheating on their taxes, drive a gas-guzzler just because they can afford it, take up two parking spots so no one will bump their precious car, and generally jigger the system if they can get away with it. We often seem to consider actions like these acceptable...without considering the fact that if everyone did it, our society as a whole would suffer.

This was thrown into sharp relief with the crippling financial crisis that began in 2008. In the lead-up to the crisis, smart people knew deep down that existing policies would not be sustainable if everyone jumped in, trying to make money from speculation rather than substance. They gambled that they could pull it off, and the free rider problem wouldn't kick it. But then it did. As Europe, too, got caught up in this "casino capitalism," we saw how interconnected our world has become, and how — with the globalization of our economies — there's now only one game in town.

A good example of how the Danish social ethic differs from others is a simple one: Danes are famous for not jaywalking. Even if the roads are empty at 3 a.m., pedestrians still stop and wait at a red light. If there's no traffic in sight, my American individualism whispers, "Why obey a silly rule?" And so I jaywalk, boldly, assuming that my fellow pedestrians will appreciate my lead and follow me. In most countries, they do. But when I jaywalk in Denmark, the locals frown at me like I'm a bad influence on the children present. That social pressure impacts even a hurried, jaywalking tourist. So, rather than feel like an evil person, I wait for the light.

Posted by Rick Steves on November 20, 2009
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There's much more to Danish contentedness than just being quaint and orderly. It's all built upon a firm cultural foundation. Danish society seems to be a finely tuned social internal-combustion engine in a glass box: Highly taxed, highly connected, and highly regulated, with all the gears properly engaged. Their system is a hybrid that, it seems, has evolved as far as socialism can go without violating the necessary fundamentals of capitalism and democracy. It's socialistic...but, with its unique emphasis on society, it's also social-istic.

What happens when a tune-up is needed? My Danish friends tell me they rely on their government. Rather than doing what's best for corporations, the Danish government clearly looks out for the people's interests. The Danes say, “If our government lets us down, we let ourselves down.”

This strong social ethic permeates the whole of Danish society. A traveler can find it in its raw and indigenous form in the rural corners and small towns — places where anyone is allowed to pick berries and nuts, but “no more than would fit in your hat.”

On a recent visit to a Danish small town, I saw this social ethic in the way a local friend of mine reacted to a controversy. The biggest hotel in his town started renting bikes to compete with Mrs. Hansen's bike rental shop. My friend was disappointed in the hotel manager, saying, “They don't need to do that — bike rental has been Mrs. Hansen's livelihood since she was a little girl.” Of course, there's no law forbidding it. And with our American business ethic, we'd just say that competition is good. But in Denmark, to look out for Mrs. Hansen's little bike rental business was a matter of neighborly decency.

Posted by Rick Steves on November 18, 2009
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Denmark's answer to Disneyland — Legoland — is a wildly popular place featuring 58 million Lego bricks built into famous landmarks from around the world. (They claim that if you lined them all up, they'd stretch from here to Italy.) The place is crawling with adorable little ice-cream-licking, blonde children. Although stoked with piles of sugar, the scene is strikingly mellow. Kids hold their mothers' hands while learning about the Lego buildings and smile contentedly as they circle around on the carousel.

Riding Danish trains is also thought-provoking. Wandering into a nearly empty, sleek train car, I noticed that each seat was marked Kan reserveres. I figured that meant “not reserved,” and sat down. Then I was bumped by a friendly Dane with a reservation. He said, “The sign means the seat ‘could be' reserved...we don't promise too much.” Noticing several young men with shaved heads and the finest headphones listening to iPods making clockwork connections on their quick and comfortable train commute to work, I thought that Denmark seemed so minimalistic and efficient...and so well-ordered.

On another train ride, I was filming a segment for a new public television show. I'd look into the camera and say, “A fun part of exploring Denmark is enjoying the efficiency of the great train system.” As usual, I needed about six or eight “takes” to get it right. My Danish friend was laughing the whole time. He finally explained that our train was running eight minutes late, and each time I said my line, all the Danes on the train around me would mutter, “No, no, no.” Clearly, it's all relative. While only two trains a day serve my town back home, these trains go six times an hour. And while many Danes go through life without ever getting around to buying a car, they still grouse about things like public transit. My friend said, “We Danes are spoiled. We love to complain.”

Posted by Rick Steves on November 16, 2009
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Traveling through Denmark, I enjoy a constant barrage of experiences that give me food for political thought. There's plenty in Denmark that an American who travels as a student of the world can ponder in order to spice up their take on well-worn social and economic issues back home. My next several blog entries will delve into a few of the joys and challenges of Danish life. It also serves as a practical example of how one European country embraces that continent's more "social-istic" system. This snapshot of Danish life is a reminder that you can glean powerful lessons even when you travel to more comfortable countries that don't seem so different from back home.

Wherever you travel, you encounter societies that are driven by a desire for their people to live well. Denmark seems particularly adept at this feat. In survey after survey, when asked whether they're content with their lives, the Danes are routinely found to be among the happiest people on earth. With each visit to Denmark, it's become my mission to figure out: What makes those Danes so darned happy?

Expensive, highly taxed, and highly efficient Denmark confuses me. The affluence of Denmark's Scandinavian cousin in Norway can be explained by their North Sea oil bonanza. But the Danes' leading natural resources are wind power, pigs, and pickled herring. Considering the very high cost of living here, the Danish lifestyle seems richer than their modest after-tax incomes would suggest. In fact, the Danes live extremely well. Traveling through what seems to be a fantasy land, you keep wondering, “How do they do it?”

First off, there's the obvious: Denmark is, simply, pleasant. I'm impressed by how serene things are, even in the bustling capital of Copenhagen. Their new subway is silent, automated, on the honor system (with random ticket checks rather than turnstiles), and trains go literally every two minutes. The streets are so quiet (thanks to downtown pedestrian-only zones) that I don't yell to my friends from a distance…I walk over to speak to them in a soft “indoors voice.” On my last visit, I saw an angry young man at the Copenhagen train station barking into his mobile phone — and it occurred to me that in a week in this country, that was the only shouting I'd heard.

When you get beyond Copenhagen and travel into the Danish countryside, you find yourself saying “cute” a lot. Thatched-roof farms dot a green landscape of rolling hills and fields. Sailboats bob in tiny harbors. Parents push kids in prams along pedestrian-only streets. Copper spires create fairy-tale skylines. The place feels like a pitch ‘n putt course sparsely inhabited by blonde Vulcans. Travelers here find the human scale and orderliness of Danish society itself the focus of their sightseeing. Everything is just so...Danish.

Posted by Rick Steves on November 13, 2009
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Gathering at a hotel on the last night of our educational tour of El Salvador, we enjoyed a trio of guitarists. They are “100 percent popular” (the safe term used these days for anything perfectly in tune with the peoples' struggle). Enjoying their performance, I thought of the guerillas who once laid flat on the floors of their shacks under flying bullets. Strumming guitars quietly on their bellies, they sang forbidden songs. Music is the horse that carries the message of poems — weapons of a people's irrepressible spirit.

Listening to their music — love songs to their country — I stared at the musicians and considered the ongoing struggle. While troubadours sing of Christ's "preferential option for the poor," the forces of globalization relentlessly restructure Salvadoran society with a preferential option for the wealthy. Watching those slender Latino fingers crawl between the frets like guerillas quietly loping through the jungle, I thought of the courageous advocates of the people throughout the developing world, not running from the forces of globalization but courageously engaging them.

They sang, “Our way of life is being erased…no more huevos picados, we now have omelets…no more colones, we now have dollars.” They wondered musically, “How can a combo meal at a fast-food chain cost $8, while $20 gathered at church feeds 200 hungry mouths? Why did God put me here?”

Behind me sat Fernando Cardenal — white and grandfatherly in his well-worn blue jeans. As the minister of education of Nicaragua's revolutionary Sandinista government back in the 1980s, he fought the US and lost. Today his country — the revolution purged from its economy — is even poorer than El Salvador. But his bright eyes nodded to the beat and message of this new generation's musical call to action.

Wrapping up my El Salvador visit with this inspirational concert, I considered how the superstars of nonviolence (Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon, Oscar Romero) all seem to get shot. Are the pacifists losers? As a competitive person, I don't like this idea. My 1988 visit to Central America was filled with hope. I came again after the defeat of people's movements in both El Salvador and Nicaragua in 1991. The tide had turned, and I wondered how the spirit of the people's movements — so exuberant just three years before — would fare after the American-funded victories in their domestic struggles. Then, in 2005, after 14 years of globalization, it was clear — there was only one game in town. Sure, Romero lives…and Jesus lives. And half the world is trying to live, too…on that two bucks a day. As a Christian, I like to see religion function as a liberator rather than an opiate. Perhaps that's why I am so enamored with Liberation Theology in Central America, and why travel here impacts my worldview so powerfully.

Refocusing on the troubadours, I heard them sing, “It's not easy to see God in the child who cleans the windshields at a San Salvador intersection…but we must.”

Posted by Rick Steves on November 11, 2009
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While visiting El Salvador, my educational tour group toured the University of Central America (UCA). While it felt like a humble college somewhere in Southern California, this place is a cultural and intellectual powerhouse in Central America. It was founded by San Salvador's rich to give their children a safe and conservative environment for a higher education. It's run by Jesuits with the mission of giving students skills to make the world a better place.

Father Sobrino, who is on the faculty, told us the Jesuits' mission today: to create liberation architects, liberation mathematicians, and liberation teachers. UCA gets no money from the government and it's no longer supported by the local elites. It relies on international aid. Because of their liberal teaching spirit, the Christmas packages from the wealthy to the professors stopped coming long ago...and the campus has been bombed 25 times.

Along with Sobrino, the school's six leading Jesuit professors were the intellectual leaders of Liberation Theology in the 1980s. That's why they were considered leaders of the revolution. And that's why, in 1989, they were murdered. (Only Sobrino, who happened to be out of the country, survived.) We walked to a memorial garden where they were killed and heard the story.

Early one morning, the Jesuits were taken from their humble quarters and dragged into the garden. One by one they were shot in the brains with exploding bullets because they were the “brains of the people's movement.” Before the government death squad left, they took time to shoot a bullet through the heart of a photo of Archbishop Oscar Romero hanging on the wall…still trying to kill him nine years after his death.

Roses grow in a garden marking the place the six Jesuits were killed. The tomb of the six reads: "What it means to be a Jesuit in our time: to commit yourself to take risks in the crucial struggle of our age — the struggle for faith and the struggle for justice which that same faith demands. We will not work for the promotion of justice without paying a price."

Reading about events in faraway lands in the newspaper, you learn what happened. Then you can flip to the sports pages or comics. But hearing the story of an event from people who lived through it, you feel what happened. Right there behind the bedrooms of those professors, the smell of the flowers, the hard labor of the man bent over in the garden, the quiet focus of students whose parents lost a revolution, the knowledge that my country provided those exploding bullets...all combined to make this experience both vivid and enduring.

Posted by Rick Steves on November 09, 2009
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El Salvador's beloved Archbishop Oscar Romero was gunned down while saying Mass in 1980. And during that time of repression, many nuns and religious laywomen were also murdered. Their spirit, like Romero's, clearly lives on in the feisty women of the church so outspoken in El Salvador today. The nuns I met through my educational tour had a passionate message and lots of quotable quotes:

"The soldiers have faded into the background. They're not shooting people any more. The new martyrs are poor children dying in the face of indifference from people who don't care and whose wealth is harvested from the suffering of others. Excluding and dehumanizing the poor is a kind of terrorism."

"Latin America has one of the biggest gaps between the rich and poor. As the gap grows, it's a kind of war. Hunger is violence. There can be no peace when there is still hunger."

"The push of globalization here has taught us that as humanity learns to worship the god of productivity, a civilization of hopelessness is being created. In traditional rural societies — like in America during the age of small family farms — a social fabric protected the poor. Agri-business has sent the rural poor into the cities in search of better jobs. Today's urban poor are isolated, alone, without community. In San Salvador today, we see many finding answers through escapism — escapism through drugs or through religious fundamentalism."

"'Forgive and forget' is the mantra of the privileged class in El Salvador. The unprivileged can forgive, but they do not want to forget. We need to become 'professors of never again' in our society."

"The US-supported government would prefer to just forget Romero and all he stood for. It controls the media. It writes the text books. On the 10th anniversary of Romero's death, not a word was seen in the newspapers. On the 20th anniversary, Cardinal Mahoney of the US came to the memorial Mass with 40,000 people attending. That was covered modestly in the papers. This year, on the 25th anniversary, the local papers are devoting many pages to the biggest rallies and marches yet. Romero vive!"

"With the spirit of Romero so alive, El Salvador is becoming the school for the globalization of solidarity. As we globalize economics, we need to globalize love and compassion. At the end of our lives, the question will be, 'How much have you loved?'”

"Suffering and sadness are not synonymous. Salvadorans laugh as hard as they cry. They love to say, 'If God wills, tomorrow will be better.' Here in El Salvador we believe that, on the day you meet your maker, you will be met by an angel to wipe away your tears. Woe to you who arrive with dry eyes."

Priests and nuns are routinely excommunicated in Central America for their political activism. While technically booted from their Church, they continue their work without missing a beat, believing, as one priest told me, “Part of our vow of obedience to the Church is disobedience to the Church.”

Posted by Rick Steves on November 06, 2009
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The reason for my 2005 visit to El Salvador was to remember Archbishop Oscar Romero on the 25th anniversary of his assassination. Marching with thousands of his followers through the streets of San Salvador, it was clear to me…just as Romero prophesized, they killed him yet he lives through his people.

I'll never forget the parade that day. Everyone in our group crayoned Romero Vive ("Romero lives") on our white T-shirts. We piled into the repainted but obviously recycled circa 1960s American school bus (the standard public transport in Central America today), drove as close as we could, and then spilled into the streets. Joining masses of Salvadorans, we funneled through their capital city and to the cathedral, which held the body of their national hero. Entrepreneurs sold bananas from woven bins and drinks in clear plastic bags pierced by paper straws. Parents packed along children born long after Romero's day. Prune-faced old ladies who couldn't handle the long march filled the backs of beat-up pickup trucks adding so rolling “granny floats” to the parade of people. Banks, Western Union offices, strip malls, and fast-food joints seemed to stand still and observe as the marchers shut down the city. Soldiers looking on appeared humbled by the crowd.

Just being there put me in solidarity with a powerful and surging people's spirit. Being a head taller than anyone else and clearly a norteamericano, I had lots of friends. Judging from the smiles I encountered, my presence was appreciated.

The parade culminated at the cathedral where, in his last sermon there, Romero had directed his words to the soldiers: “You are brothers of the poor. These are your people. More important than any order from your commanders is God's order: Thou shalt not kill. I beg you. I implore you. In the name of God, I command you. Stop the killing.” The next week, while leading a Mass, Romero was shot dead.

The symbolic resurrection of Romero in his people is depicted in colorful murals showing the people of El Salvador rising like tall stocks of corn with big smiles and bullet wounds in their hands. In Latin America, crosses are decorated with peasants and symbols of their lives — healthy stocks of corn. While this is a land of martyrs, it's also a fertile land of resurrection.

Oscar Romero is not yet a saint. While the Vatican sends mixed signals, the local Catholic hierarchy is gradually trying to sanitizing his image to be less offensive to the rich. But priests, nuns, and people throughout Central America are not waiting. For them, Oscar Romero is already "San Romero."

Posted by Rick Steves on November 04, 2009
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Every empire in history has been plagued by angry forces on its fringes that refused to play by the rules. Romans were pestered and ultimately defeated by barbarians. The British dealt with and lost to colonial American guerilla patriots. The Habsburgs were plagued by what they derided as “anarchists”...and were eventually defeated. And today, if you're hugely outgunned — as all enemies of America are — you get creative. You shoot from the bushes like we did when we fought the Redcoats. Sure, we might like our enemies to follow our rules…to line up in formation so we can carpet-bomb them. But our enemies know that if someone decides to fight the US, they have two choices; be dead, or be “a terrorist.”

In our generation, America risks going broke and selling its soul to fight its “War on Terror.” The problem is that there's always been terrorism and there always will be terrorism. It's a technique, not an enemy. And because the targeted “enemy” is a technique, you can fight a “War on Terror”...but you cannot win it.

On a recent visit to Washington, DC, I heard lawmakers using the terms "hard power" and "soft power." Hard power assumes that military might is the best way to get what you want. Soft power respects the influence of something less tangible: goodwill. Winning the "hearts and minds" of our would-be enemies, and improving the so-called "Brand of America," makes it harder for foreign terrorists or bombastic leaders to mobilize people against us. Imagine a US president presenting himself in a way that makes it impossible for the leader of a country we're at odds with to demonize the American president in order to stay in power. Imagine using our military to build bridges and highways instead of blowing them up. It'd be better for the innocent people who live in those places (not to mention better for our troops). While this might seem a little too "touchy-feely" for our militaristic society, it's less expensive — and certainly less destructive — than hard power.

If we can soften the way we wield our power, we might find some solutions that work better for us...and for the rest of the planet. Is this naive? Maybe. But as we've seen, it's clear the opposite approach has its flaws.

Even when people around the world are frustrated by our policies, they're still inspired by the ideals of America. And, after nearly four decades of travels through political ups and downs — even when I talk with Salvadorans whose families were torn apart by US-funded soldiers — it's clear to me that people across the world want to like Americans. My travels have taught me that we have friends everywhere ready to put the past behind them and to once again be inspired by both our ideals and our leadership.

Posted by Rick Steves on November 02, 2009
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