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“Don’t go there! It is too dangerous!”

Francisco Miraval

I recently shared with a friend my desire of one day spending a few days at a paradisiac beach in the Caribbean, probably, I said, in the Dominican Republic (a place I never visited). My friend immediately began to dissuade me from implementing such an idea because, he said, “it could be something very dangerous”.

With the best intentions, he insisted I should never go to a “Third World” country and, instead, I should plan my vacations in the United States and, even better, in Colorado, where I live. After all, he said, here we enjoy rights and protection we will not enjoy in other parts of the world.

“What’s the point of going to a place you don’t know?” he asked. “Do you really want to be among people you don’t know and whose only purpose is to take advantage of you because they you are a tourist?” He strongly suggested I should stay close to home where I can be almost certain nothing bad will happen to me.

Perhaps he is right, I said to myself. Perhaps I shouldn’t travel to a “violent” (in his perception) place and I should stay in Colorado where I can enjoy a degree of tranquility I may not have doing nothing on a Caribbean beach.

Let’ see. I can go, for example, to watch the release of a movie at a local theater at midnight. After all, what could go wrong? It is not that anybody will ever enter a movie theater, throw gas grenades, and start shooting people. That’s insane and I am sure it will never happen in the city where I live.

Or perhaps one day I can visit a church to be part of a prayer meeting or a religious service. Nothing bad can happen there. Nobody will ever enter a church just to kill people prayer and worshipping. And certainly that will never ever happen in Colorado.

Perhaps, I said to myself, instead of taking a vacation I can volunteer at a local kindergarten, or t a high school, or at a college. No shootings ever take places at schools and the lives of children, teenagers, and young adults dedicated to learning are always respected, as well as the lives of their teachers. Who will ever enter a school or college just to kill people?

If I don’t want to go to a movie theater, a church, or a school, perhaps I can volunteer at a local health clinic. I don’t need any kind of treatment, but I know health clinics are always looking for volunteers. I am sure nobody will ever enter a health clinic in Colorado just to shoot people. That’s absurd and unthinkable.

Obviously, I sincerely thanked my friend for his advice, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how easy is to imagine somebody else’s problems and to deny our own problems. As somebody once said, we can see the sawdust in somebody else’s eye, and we don’t the plank in our own eye.

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