The bartender introduced himself to me as Junior while he prepared my candy-colored, non-alcoholic drink. “And you?” he asked. He stood at a medium height, wore tan skin beneath a cocktail shirt that was ill-suited to the Peruvian desert climate, and had a kindly face that bordered on effeminate.

“I’m Ben,” I replied before he shot obligatorily back, “Where are you from, Ben?”

His tone landed somewhere between courteous and perfunctory.

When meeting fellow travelers, this exchange is almost as natural as breathing. Even in talks with shopkeepers, waiters, or in this case, amiable hostel bartenders, the topic of home is nearly inescapable. Yet, with each new trip abroad, I’ve felt a growing weight buried within the question. And each time it comes my turn to answer it, a quiet dread wells within my throat.

In 2024, I traveled through Mexico and Belize, and every time I announced myself as a citizen of “The States,” the chaos of my nation’s politics would generally at least be a footnote in the dialogue that followed. People would ask me how it was possible for Trump to run a campaign for president — let alone avoid prison time — after all that he had done. Even back then, I wondered whether it might be best to simply identify myself as a Canadian whenever asked about my country of origin.

In 2025, I went to Costa Rica. And by then, the “Where are you from?” question had mounted into a heavier topic still. Not only did I have to contend with the fact that Trump had been allowed to run for office after everything he’d done, but that the country I called home was willing to vote for him in overwhelming numbers. Yet even then, there remained some shred of doubt as to whether his administration would truly devolve into the political hellscape that his most fervent opponents predicted.

“I’m from the states,” I responded unsurely to Junior after a protracted pause. Unsure, not because I was uncertain I’d spent my entire life in the star-spangled, red-blooded, gun-toting USA, but because of how the words might register.

As my reply reached Junior, he turned toward me and responded, “Venezuela.”

I gulped a weighty gulp as I considered the way that Trump had taken the leader of his country hostage, paraded him as a political prisoner, and then proceeded to proclaim himself as the new acting leader and oil tycoon of the nation Junior once called home. I fell temporarily paralyzed as I wrestled with the impulse to apologize over an act I took no part in.

Cups and plates clattered in his hands as he did his best to attend to the few other customers seated at the bar beside me. But I saw a flash in his eyes upon my response that seemed more than the surface level acknowledgement that he customarily reserved for travelers and their answers to that typically token question. A slow and deliberate nod shielded something deeper, and I debated whether to address the elephant in the room — what were his thoughts on what had happened? I decided to broach the subject.

But I raised it in such a roundabout fashion that it exhausted the limits of his English. So I repeated it back a little more directly, and he measured his words for a couple seconds before asking me if I spoke Spanish. Spurred on by the tentative nod of the healthily bronzed gringo seated before him, he launched into heated monologue. But I quickly found that the rapid-fire succession of thoughts emerging from his mouth soared similarly beyond the bounds of my shaky Spanish skills.

With the help of a translation app, he expressed gratitude at receiving the question and unpacked his conflicted thoughts on the subject: how Maduro was a horrendous leader, but that his removal from power created a vacuum that had left his loved ones in even greater danger than in the years prior. He explained that he hadn’t returned home once in the past decade, and that the current climate hardly offered fertile grounds for repatriation. He hadn’t seen his own parents in nine years, and he doubted that he would anytime soon. His eyes glassed up and then quickly sobered.

As I waited for my ceviche to be served, a few Swiss women I’d met on a hike up the nearby dunes walked along the oasis that served as our dusty town’s gravitational center. After greeting me and briefly surveying the restaurant’s menu, they accepted my invitation to join me for a meal. And within a few minutes, the subject of politics came up. Specifically, the politics of my country.

As Americans, we’re continually reaffirmed in the belief that we’re the center of everything. In our very ability to introduce ourselves as “Americans,” there’s an ingrained dismissal of all the other Americas and an enduring proof of our ethnocentrism.

And yet, time and time again, it’s a near-given assumption that the travelers I meet will have a far greater understanding of my country’s political turmoil than I have of theirs. Often, I see that they, too, buy into the conception that The United States is the most consequential country on earth. Given the events of the past year, it’s hardly a wonder why much of the world looks toward us with such begrudging deference. It would be futile to deny the influence we hold.

To call myself an American is to be an ashamed extension of the most powerful man on earth — the capricious leader who says the word “tariffs” and sends the global stock market into a frenzy, who kidnaps the leader of other sovereign nations, who deports naturalized US citizens to countries from which they don’t even hail. Who threatens to take over Greenland and claim Canada as our 51st state.

There’s an enviable anonymity that people have in saying they’re from any one of the world’s many countries that keep to themselves. I wish that the attitude people had toward my home was one of ignorance rather than resentful subservience. I wish that our actions didn’t demand rapt attention from the sprawling world around us, and that our affairs could unfold unnoticed.

Sometimes, there’s a subtle moment of tension that arises as people wait for me to separate myself from my nation’s leadership, to clarify that I’m disgusted by the overreaches of this administration. The Swiss women I had dinner with tried to keep their curiosity at bay as they waited for the signal that they were safe to express their unvarnished opinions.

I spoke about how frustrating it is that both sides of the political spectrum are so utterly incapable of speaking to one another — how both Democrats and Republicans uniformly view their opponents as cult members. And in my lamentation, one of the Swiss women discerned a shred of neutrality, of sympathy toward the MAGA movement. “But… you didn’t vote for him, right?” she asked, a palpable trepidation shading her tone. I happily confirmed her hope and watched as the entire table around me breathed a collective sigh of relief.

As I waited to board a flight from Lima to Cusco, a German man sat beside me. He was another writer. We spent a couple minutes commiserating about just how uncommon our career path seemed to be. Coincidence after coincidence abounded as the hour before boarding dwindled down into only seconds. As we filed into line, he told me he’d spent the past couple of years working on a screenwriting project, and that the finished product was about to premiere in Miami.

“Are you planning to go see it?” I asked as a familiar weight surfaced in the room.

“I would… but I’m just not sure that it’s safe,” he explained.

Trying to make light of this routine friction, I sardonically joked, “I think you’re white enough to be safe.” I wish that the humor weren’t rooted in such a grim reality.

“Well, you may be right. But I hear they’re checking the social media accounts of visitors now, and rejecting anyone who’s posted antifa content. Some Germans are being denied entry into the country, and others are being held up in airports as they attempt to return. The German government advises against all travel to the United States.”

I wish that I could have reassured him that his suspicions were paranoid, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell my new friend that he’d be safe attending the premiere of his own movie. I didn’t know that he would be.

He explained that he not only fears setting foot inside the United States, but fears how each and every move my country makes from here will frame the future of the entire European continent.

To belong to the most powerful country on earth is to inherit part of its shadow. I travel through the world as a private citizen, yet, so often, I’m received as an extension of something vast and unpredictable. Each time I answer that simple question of “Where are you from?” I feel saddled by the weight of a nation that leaves craters wherever it steps.

Believe this piece should earn its author more than $0.00? The only way that writers on this platform are compensated for the time and effort they put into their work are through paid subscriptions and donations. If this piece resonated with you, it would mean a lot if you considered offering your support. These travel-related articles are among my favorite to write, and I’d love to publish more of them.

Subscribe now

Share

I often find it difficult to address politics when my stance on a given topic is little more than, “Well, this is bad.” And the past year has been a steady stream of dismal developments. Trump’s cabinet members are bad, and his policy is bad, and the public statements he makes serve as napalm on a r…

Read more

There are any number of reasons that people cite in the discussion about why Democrats lost the 2024 election. Harris didn’t campaign hard enough. She didn’t strategize well enough. The strategies she did employ were too little too late. She wasn’t centrist enough. She wasn’t progressive enough.

If only Joe Biden had dropped o…

Read more

Watching injustices unfold across the nation, I’ve seen more and more voters on my side of the aisle fall into a similar line of thinking. “All Trump supporters are bad people. They voted for everything that our country is going through now.” It’s not difficult to see why this dour perception has taken hold.

It’s becom…

Read more

Venturing outside of the reaches of Philadelphia to meet my friend at a bar, perhaps I shouldn’t have been terribly surprised to learn that the venue would be populated largely by Trump supporters. The magnetism that it holds for my friend, though, has far more to do with the pool table centerpiece and the accompanyin…

Read more

Thanks so much to everyone who could tune in!

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on the Middle East. In it, I made the case that most of us simply don’t have the knowledge or background to weigh in on the tension between Israel and Palestine. The least qualified voices tend to dominate the conversation.

I received a comment on the piece that caught my attention …

Read more

One of the ways that I try to approach political writing is by sharing perspectives that I haven’t already seen explored. When new stories and controversies break out, it’s easy to fall in line with the million other journalists and commentators going over the same set of facts. I could talk about the specifics of Trump’s …

Read more

Read more

I stumbled onto a comment a few days ago on Substack about artificial intelligence.

It read, “I block people who use AI. I block people who tell other people it’s ok to use AI. I block people who use AI for editing, too. For ideas. For anything related to creative writing.

Sometimes I think I’m overreacting. But no, I’m not. I…

Read more

For the past few months, I’ve had a hard time addressing politics. A lot of the reason for this is probably relatable. As chaos has swept the country, creators are struggling to create. There’s a sense of despondency that many of us are feeling right now. It’s hard to muster the strength to say anything at all.

But a lo…

Read more

As a Jew who’s been to Israel, it might be expected that I have a lot of thoughts about what’s going on right now in the Middle East. But the truth is, it’s because of the time I spent there that I only feel qualified to wade into this controversy on rare occasions. I have a better understanding now of just how much…

Read more

This is an article that I wrote a few months ago. But as the relationship between Trump and Elon has (predictably) begun to disintegrate, I feel that the take is a relevant one to reshare today.

Read more

This is another piece I wrote leading up to the election, but the point is every bit as relevant today.

To listen to a voice over of this article, click here.

Read more

In happier times, there never used to be a feeling of guilt that went along with writing what I wanted to write. It would be an end in itself regardless of the topic. But as I’ve watched democracy erode around me, there’s been a growing sense that the only subject worth talking about is politics.

I think a lot about t…

Read more

There’s a question I’ve found that’s useful to ask each time the country gets embroiled in a new political drama. You’ve probably heard it before.

“What if the tables were turned?”

It’s a simple enough hypothetical, but part of what makes it so valuable is that it can’t be universally applied. There are plenty of situations that are so outlandish that imagining a partisan reversal simply doesn’t work. There are political offenses so exaggerated, so transparently corrupt, that they only make sense coming from one side of the aisle in the country we know today.

The question, “What if it were Biden accepting the private jet from Qatar, and promising to hoard it for himself when/if he leaves office?” simply holds no weight. It’s a non-starter. The scenario could never feasibly come to pass, and even the most devoted Trump supporters would have trouble building a case that our former leader would ever do something so flagrantly corrupt.

It’s equal measures difficult to envision the alternate timeline where Biden would have stoked a riot over Twitter and then encouraged that same mob to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell.” He never called the free press “the enemy of the people.” He’s never threatened to revoke credentials from news outlets for covering him critically. And for all his flaws, most would be hard-pressed to imagine him outright refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power or threatening an illegal third term in office.

But there are still those situations that arise where it’s not so hard to envision if things had only gone a slightly different way. Even in our polarized country, there are significant developments that fall into an ambiguous gray zone. The tribal lines blur often enough that the “what if the tables were turned?” question holds more merit than many stop to consider.

Read more

If you enjoyed our talk, you can support my work on here for under $2.00 a month.

Get 10% off forever

Get 20% off forever

Get 30% off forever

Get 40% off forever

Get 50% off forever