When I was about 12, I read Will Durant’s The Lessons of History. It basically says that humanity’s fate is shaped mostly by geography, climate, disease, and many other factors that are completely out of our control. I was left with the question of whether or not we can even shape our own destiny. I still can’t answer that question. I’ve spent the last 55 years of my life trying to figure it out. I left home when I was 15 and hitch-hiked around America, reading history, economics, political science along the way.
By pure chance I found myself in Turkey just when the military took over in order to save democracy there, in 1980. In my travels in the region, I saw political violence in the cities, Anatolian villages still in a condition of feudalism, absolute repression in Syria, and civil war in Lebanon. Later I went to college to see what I could learn there, and taught English in Japan and Kentucky, where I became deeply involved in the Mexican and Guatemalan community and learned much about the question of undocumented migration, what drives it and how to solve it humanely and to the benefit of everyone. So, this book is the result of my own life and the life of those I have met along the way.
