12/08/2025
I always find posts like this fascinating.
“We travel abroad so we don’t raise conservatives who lack empathy.”
That’s a comfortable opinion to have when you’ve never seen real hardship up close.
We adopted our daughter from an orphanage with no electricity.
No running water.
The only water available came from a contaminated well.
That wasn’t a “different way of life.”
That was survival.
Not a curated European train station. Not a walkable city with cafes and healthcare.
A place where opportunity was scarce, infrastructure was broken, and the future was painfully narrow.
I’ve also done a combat tour in Iraq.
I’ve stood in places where:
• safety is not guaranteed
• freedom is fragile
• government failure has real, immediate consequences
• empathy doesn’t pay the electric bill or keep your kids alive
So when someone equates traveling through wealthy parts of Europe with “worldly wisdom” while calling half the country morally deficient, I don’t hear compassion. I hear privilege masquerading as depth.
Seeing how other countries live didn’t make me embarrassed of America.
It made me grateful.
Grateful that our adopted daughter gets to grow up in a country where her life isn’t capped by the zip code she was born into.
Grateful that my sons are being raised in a place where opportunity still exists, even if it isn’t perfect.
And grateful that I learned empathy the hard way. Not through travel hashtags, but through responsibility, risk, and reality.
You don’t raise empathetic kids by sneering at people who disagree with you.
You raise them by teaching gratitude, resilience, and respect for the country that gives them a fighting chance.
