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I posted the above on Instagram Tuesday during the mid-term elections and got some very strong reactions, in a good way…so I thought I would share our thoughts here today. Will likely lose some people again and that is ok. We are making an effort to strengthen our brand and to be recognized as THE travel company, YouTubers, etc who support equality. The best way to do this is to shout it from the rooftops.
Many years ago when we started WorldTowning I was given some advice, “do not mix politics and business, it will harm your business.” To which I responded, “in the world we live in TODAY we refuse to camouflage bad treatment of humans as politics so we can get away with it by saying we don’t discuss politics in our business.” This might have been a good policy to run a business by 20 years ago, but not today as politics has changed drastically. In addition, I am not particularly interested in doing any business with people who want to marginalize those who have already suffered enough. We are humanitarians first, our brand will ALWAYS stand on the side of equality and we will never say “it’s just politics” if humans are being marginalized. Politics is policies and should not decide what women can do with their bodies, who can marry who and if someone is better than someone else because of the color of their skin. That is just bad human-ing and not politics.
You might be amazed to know that Will and I never considered ourselves political and to this day we still don’t. We have always voted, but we were never working the polling stations, protesting on election day or engaging in heated political discussions over Thanksgiving dinner. It was just not our thing. We had Republican friends. We had fiscally conservative friends. We had ultra Liberal friends. Republicans and Democrats mixed pretty seamlessly in the circles we traveled professionally and in our friend groups for many years of our life together.
But, then life changed when Trump was elected. By this point most of our friends had transitioned to Democrats over the prior years already and those who remained Republican did not vote Republican for the first time in their lives. To this day they still identify as Republican in many ways, but vote Democrat because they are humanitarians first. We have some amazing friends.
When Trump was elected we felt a deep pull to fight for humanity because there was a consistent thread of lack there of it emerging in politics. I still hate politics to this day, lets just say I never had a desire to be a politician. But what I hate more is when good people are treated like second class citizens. So when someone says to me “it’s just politics,” my response is always “nope, we have a choice in life to do good to other humans or not and we can’t call that politics even though it has been weaved into our American political system.”
We have been called Liberals, woke, bleeding heart, tree hugger, snowflakes, some words I won’t put in writing and more, but the word our brand identifies with most is Humanitarian. We will always choose to walk on the side that gives women, minorities and LGBTQ+ rights. Period! And we won’t just say it, we will vote based on this mission. Please do not ask us to see the other side or let’s all try to get along. There is no other side when we are talking about restricting human rights for SOME individuals. It is a weak position to expect us all to except this behavior as ok and now play nice. Humans before anything else: fear, money, notoriety, racism, chauvinism, homophobia…all of it. WorldTowning will never hover in the middle or just say nothing (while posting amazing travel pictures) in order to generate business or keep our followers. If we do this for our own profit we are no better than the politicians who marginalize these individuals and those who vote for them.
I had planned on talking about solo international flights and how we have handled them over the years with the kids, but it seemed so unimportant compared to fighting for humans. Next week!
Here we come Morocco!
Tomorrow we will leave Colombia for Morocco to host our second group trip in this magical land. We had to cancel TWO during Covid, one of which was canceled only a month before. It was the right thing to do as restrictions prevented us from being able to offer the trip we had promised, but boy it was sad, very sad. We are lucky to have 3 ladies on this trip who have been registered for previous Morocco trips and held on for this to finally happen, as well as many new guests. Although we are in those last couple of days before a trip and everything feels like it is on fast forward we are SO DAMN EXCITED to be back. at it. This is the second trip we have been able to host since lockdowns subsided and travel opened back up, plus it is sold out…Yippie. Our Peru trip in March is also sold out and we are looking to launch Costa Rica very soon for April.
A big thank you to anyone who has supported us through this Covid drought of group trips, shared us with your friends or joined our trips. We are back! And to think we said “no more,” just several months back because we thought travel would not open back up for years. We are also working on dates for India and getting a wait list going for that as well. WorldTowning Voyages is back and on fire.
Thank you for joining us this week. A little different of a post, but one that was necessary to share. I welcome helpful discussion on how we can be better humans and stop the marginalizing that is so prominent in our political system these days.
xoxo,
Jessica
To learn more about us, our mission and our business you can visit us at WorldTowning. To view our most recent group trip offerings head on over to WorldTowningvoyages.com. If you are interested in booking a coaching session in an effort to realize your travel dream, schedule it here. If you want to follow the travels of our WorldTowning family, you can find us on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok
Thank you for being you! Thank you for standing up for what you believe. There is too many people out there doing YouTube videos and not wanting to stand up for what’s important. You And your family are wonderful. ❤️❤️
Love following you all! Curious if you would allow Republicans on your group trips?