One hundred years ago, the Roaring ‘20s began. During that decade, aviation, electricity, and automobiles thrust us into the future. The Harlem Renaissance, jazz and flappers, Art Deco and the Charleston modernized Western culture. Women in the U.S. finally, if partially, gained the right to vote. Paris and Buenos Aires and Chicago and Berlin swang with sophistication and swag as their post-war economies boomed, often on the backs of the desperate and/or decadent from less-desirable locales (after all, before there was Josephine’s Île Saint-Louis, there was Josephine’s East Saint Louis). With vim, verve, pep, and nerve, the Roaring ‘20s taught us how to live, how to travel, how to transform into anything we wanted to be.
The year is now 2020, the numbers invoking a clarity of vision, of purpose, of understanding, of optimism. As human beings, we’ve never had as much ability to connect across cultures, beyond background and boundaries as we have today. Hand-held technology keeps us in communication with friends, lovers, business partners, colleagues, and family members continents away. Traveling, per mile, has become cheaper than at any other time in the history of mankind. We’re able to support global causes, with our presence or our presents, and see the benefit in real time. We can bear witness to regime-change and imperfect human progress. We can see the previously unseen. We can love the previously unloved.
And as the world is spinning faster, it is also becoming smaller. At the start of this decade, we can fly from San Francisco to Johannesburg in just over 24 hours, with a single stop in New York, London, or Dubai. We can move to Paris and Bogotá and Accra and Mumbai and back, sustaining connections made across seas and skies with unprecedented ease. We can see, we should see, with clarity of vision, purpose, understanding, and optimism, that the whole world is our tribe.
The year is now 2020. In these Soaring ‘20s, it’s time to live. It’s time to travel. It’s time to transform into anything you want to be.
It’s time to fly.
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Be on the look-out for FLY BROTHER with Ernest White II, the new travel docu-series coming to PBS member stations nationwide in April.