What place in the world do you never want to visit? Why?
I refuse to visit any places where people are made to suffer more than per usual.
That is to say where cruel and unusual punishments or imoral/amoral regimes contrive to make the lives of their subjects a living hell.
Life is complicated enough without having rulers pile their share of misery on the back of the silent majority.
That is to say, the likes of Myanmar, Afganistan, China, UK, France, Saudi Arabia, North Korea and others, won’t get my money or my person.
And because of this, nor will they be graced by the presence of my wife and daughter.
Our family won’t subsidize any regimes that treat people as second class citizens, women as slaves, and foreigners as serfs, dispossessing them, throwing them in prison, killing them.
The problem is that the list of such places of shame for the human race, keeps on growing.
For liberty is retreating across the entire globe, as the forces of obscurantism are on the offensive everywhere at once… including sometimes very close to the hearth.
Sometimes I feel as though the best parts of the human experience have already been lived through by the people who gave us frescoes like those gracing the walls of San Lorenzo Basilica in Firenze.
It is there that one finds the peaceful seclusion away from a world gone mad.
Bellarion was right:
“Pax multa in cella, foris autem plurima bella.”
Götterdämmerung 