This essay has three backstories. The first backstory is that I have issues with our fake president…big issues. In an attempt to present a more scholarly means to diss Donald the Dumb, I decided to write my essay base upon three learned people. George Santayana, a Spanish American writer, who went to Harvard and then taught there. Santayana said, “A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.” It is clear to me that Donald the Dumb didn’t learn either in school or outside of school.

Maya Angelou is my second scholar. She was a writer, civil rights advocate, and a professor. Her thoughts about travel addressed the obvious. “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” Our fake president has problems with people of color and/or traveling to countries of people of color.

Muhammad, my third scholar and thinker said of travel, “Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you traveled.” Muhammad’s assumption is that one learns through travel. In Muhammad’s case, whatever travel he did was a teaching moment for him.

My selection of the three relates to Donald the Dumb’s dislike for Hispanics, blacks, and Muslims. He is a racist, a xenophobe, a white supremacist, and a sexist. My recent article, A Teaching Moment dealt with that reality.

My second backstory is about Sandy, my web administrator, who is in her mid-twenties, a Muslim from Pakistan, and works in Sweden. She emailed me regarding my essay about my teaching moment. The email can be read at the end of this article. Sandy was surprised by the drawing of Muhammad. Muslims never draw pictures of him for religious reasons. Nonetheless, she wrote about going on a hajj to Mecca with her mother and Ali, her husband. Additionally, she included a half a dozen photos related to places where they visited, like the cave at Hira, which I mentioned in my essay.

The third and final backstory has to do with a student that is in one of my classes this semester. She came from Greece and wrote an essay about the Greek Orthodox Church. Instead of addressing the parallels between Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam not painting religious people in either religion, I opted for writing about Shelley’s comment, “We are all Greeks.” Shelley’s point was that we in the West think in the manner of the ancient Greeks. Shelly added, “Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece.”

The next email from Sandy was in reply to my essay, Yearning for Faraway Places. She was excited about her next trip. She told me that she and Ali, her husband, are traveling to Norway to visit the Trolltunga cliff area.

Sandy will send me a photo of Ali and her waving to me like this couple.

I live life with some abandon but not like this. Traveling is the greatest educator, but this is a bit extreme….

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This is the letter from Sandy.

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This is a great video of Trolltunga.

This is a drone video of several breathtaking places in Norway including Trolltunga.

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