Life on an isola does not necessarily have to be isolated
In the seventeen years that I have lived in Europe, I’ve only had the time to come back home for short holidays. Short, admittedly, by European standards means several weeks, either in the summer or at Christmas. This year, in occasion of my father’s waning health, I spent several months getting to know my own country once again. Any one who has lived abroad cannot deny what most people know without ever having to leave: that America truly is the greatest country in the world. However, living away from home allows you to have a perspective on the things that make America great, things that most Americans tend to take for granted. One of those things and perhaps the greatest of all for anyone with a thirst for knowledge, is the unlimited access to information that is readily available and free to anyone who makes what little effort it takes to go to a public library or simply pick up the telephone.
That the resources of information in America are so infinite and so readily accessible renders that much less comprehensible the prevailing incognizance in the general public and the inadequate coverage in most American newspapers regarding international issues. It was, therefore, a great pleasure and surprise to read in the "Island Reporter," the series of articles on Cuba covering Ralph Kircher’s visit to Havana as one of the eleven journalists from the Florida Press Association invited by the Cuban government to visit and report on the state of the island. And it was following a meeting and discussion with him regarding our personal concern for international issues that the idea for this column was born.
No doubt there will be those who feel that such issues have little place in an island newspaper. America itself has a long and repeated tradition of regression to isolationism. Whenever an international crisis has forced the United States into the forefront, at the resolution of that conflict there has always been the tendency for America to revert to that same state of isolation. The falling of the Berlin Wall is but the latest excuse for America to withdraw its prominence from European policies.
People who choose to live on an island may be accused of being isolationists by virtue of that very choice. The Italian word for island is isola, the etymological connection to isolation being that much more evident.
My feeling, however, is that although the inhabitants of Sanibel may want to extract themselves from certain aspects of civilization, such as over-commercialization, I don’t believe they want to sever themselves from the knowledge of what goes on in the outside world. That was certainly the case when I lived on Sanibel many years ago and, judging from the choice of newspapers available at Bailey’s General Store among which The European, it seems to be even more so today.
It is in that spirit that this column will be written: a viewpoint of American and world issues from a former resident of Sanibel who has been living abroad for the past 17 years.
July 1995
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