Rick Steves recalls how 9/11 politicized him

The New Yorker

"After 9/11, I found myself kind of politicized," says the PBS travel host in an interview with The New Yorker. "People would hire me to go all over the country and give talks, thinking I’m going to talk about a nice hike and a nice café, and here I’m talking about drug-policy reform and legislating morality and environmental issues and how Europe is dealing with the fallout of an economy built on colonialism or whatever. And they said, 'We didn’t hire you to talk about politics.' And then I thought, Well, I’d better change the name of my talk. So I started calling it 'Travel as a Political Act.' It really came along with this idea that I think is so fundamental, which is, the most frightened people are the people who don’t travel. Fear is for people who don’t get out very much."