Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ported Tamils from India (who were more desperate and willing to work for less). When
colonial rule became more trouble than the tea was worth, the Brits gave the island its
freedom. But, thanks to England's love of tea, the Sinhalese and Tamils found themselves
locked in a tragic, 26-year-long civil war.
When I consider the problems that come with planting Israelis in Palestine, Protest-
ants in Ireland, Russians in Estonia, Serbs in Croatia, and Tamils in Sinhalese Sri Lanka,
I'm impressed both by the spine of the people who were there first and the hardship
borne by the ancestors of the original settlers. When observing this sort of sectarian strife,
travelers see that when people from one land displace others from their historic home-
land—regardless of the rationale or justification—a harsh lesson is learned. Too often the
resulting pain (which can last for so many centuries that many even forget its roots) is far
greater for all involved than the short-term gain for the powers doing the planting.
I am a Europhile. I freely admit I have a romantic fascination with Europe and an appreci-
ation for its way of life. But I'm not blind to the fact that Europe has its character flaws and
is grappling—not always very well—with some serious challenges of its own. I've written
glowingly about Europe's bold implementation of socialism, but tough times in the late
2000s and early 2010s clearly demonstrated that Europe isn't immune to global economic
crises. I'm certainly not an economist. But here's my take on the situation from a travel
writer's perspective.
For a long time, both the US and Europe have been consuming more goods than
we've produced. We import more than we export—and things finally caught up with us.
Through the first decade of the 2000s, it seems that everybody overspent: The United
States overspent on military endeavors and tax cuts, Europe overspent on infrastructure
and entitlements, and individuals in both places committed to mortgages they couldn't
really afford. By riding wild real-estate bubbles and creating an economy designed to gen-
erate profit by rearranging the furniture without producing anything, we conned ourselves
into thinking we were wealthier than we actually were. In the fall of 2008, it quickly be-
came clear that the world economy had been living on borrowed time.
The resulting Great Recession hit people hard on both sides of the Atlantic. Some
American conservatives tried to blame Europe's economic woes on its “high taxes, big
government” model. But if anything, Europe's financial troubles resulted from aggress-
ively capitalistic business models imported from America. In short, Ireland's economy
went downhill because of a good ol' American-style housing bubble…not because they
have universal healthcare, or because Germany built them freeways.
