Rick Steves: Educator, Adventurer, Peacemaker

 Rick Steves is an American ambassador of peace and a bridger of worlds.

There are very few ambassadors of peace in the world who use their platform and celebrity to bridge the gap between East and West. Rick Steves, an American travel writer and PBS show host, is one of them.

On April 5, Steves wrote an article about the mainstream misinformation about the Israeli-Palestinian crisis called, "Reflections on Israel and Palestine."  He begins by saying:

I've been duped.

Do you know the frustration you feel when you believed in something strongly and then you realize that the information that made you believe was from a source with an agenda to deceive?

I just watched a powerful and courageous documentary called Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land. It certainly has its own agenda and doesn't present balanced coverage. Still, it showed me how my understanding of the struggles in the Middle East has been skewed by most of our mainstream media. I saw how coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian problem is brilliantly controlled and shaped. I pride myself in understanding how the media works... and I find I've been bamboozled.

This article took courage because it is a risk to go against the official narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. The mainstream engineered climate of anti-Palestinian opinion in the United States is totalitarian in its nature and scope. Acknowledging the humanity of the Palestinian people and the justness of their struggle for self-determination makes Steves a heretic.

Maybe PBS will fire him in response and the mainstream media will ban him from television. They will call him anti-Semitic, a crazy conspiracy theorist, and throw the book at him. But this won't work against Rick because of his down-to-earth, likable, and kind personality.

This isn't the first time that Rick has acted in the interests of peace and common humanity. In November 2009, he gave a public lecture in Seattle about his visit to Iran and how the country is not presented to the American people in its full complexity.

Rick spoke about his philosophy towards travel and travel writing in a lecture in April 2008 called, "Travel as a Political Act." He said:

"It's interesting to be a travel writer talking about politics. And what's the deal, why would a travel writer even have anything to say about politics. Well, it's occurred to me since about 9/12 that the role of a travel writer needs to be like the court jester in the Middle Ages. You know, in the Middle Ages the Kings were ruling and the court jester would go out there and goof around in the puddle and the gutter with everybody and he was welcomed to come back into the court and tell the King the truth. And the King didn't kill him. The King needed to know that. And it feels today that a lot of people can't come home and say what they learned outside of our country. And as a travel writer, I fee like that's my challenge and I just feel like it's the role of an honest travel writer in this day and age."

He added:

"I see my country more isolated than ever. I see a lot of fear in our society. I can't believe all the fear. 75 years ago this month, Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to teach us we have nothing to fear but fear itself. And now we're even using fear against us for people's interests. And I found in my travels the flip-side of fear is understanding. Why am I not afraid of something when somebody else is? Because I've traveled and I understand that it's really not worth being afraid of. Maybe I'm just being duped, maybe I'm naive, but I believe that you can undo fear by better understanding.

When you travel you understand this wide gap between the rich and the poor on this planet, and it's not always comfortable for us to deal with it honestly, but I'm just tired of embracing lies. I want to deal with it. It's not a guilt trip, it's just a reality. There is a huge gap.

Our country is so crazed about national security. And I really believe that if you're concerned about national security you've got to start thinking out of the box here because ironically we're doing everything wrong for national security with a passion. And I find there are powerful people in our society that would find it convenient if we were all just dumbed down. And I don't want to be dumbed down. If they say go shopping, I say no. Why do you want me to go shopping? So we need to expect each other to be smarted up."

Those are great words.

Rick is a great example of the power of the free market, the power of ideas, and the power of travel.