Flights

Dr dear Dr: As a christian I am staring down at an airline ticket print-out from my computer, and discussing whether I have a right to international travel in this timeframe, is this a right I have and can I enjoy the exercise of such a right?

While meditating on novels such as The Prisoner of Zenda and The Man in the Iron Mask, Fleet Street journalists and amateur philosophers on papers have opined that the nation-state over time could easily become a prison for a nation, and one of their number, Chesterton, remarked that the difference is in the pudding; for some Britons internationalism is a miracle, it is kind of inconceivable that people should well just be international in their mental ranges and long range scopes, whereas for the average Catholic european, internationalism was the ordinary bread and butter of their daily lives, they were used to it. In sum, it was not a miracle to cross borders. With cheap airlines and airways vectored into the equations of modern living ever since the 1980s and 1990s, especially the genius of air travel, Mike and the boys over at Dublin, international travel became a large-scale phenomenon, and it produced in that time frame a massive amount of cheap air travel, with people jumping on and off flights like there was no tomorrow, a lovely time, a precious time, but helas not always and everywhere going to be a permanent time. Soon Covid-19 struck the whole industry amidships, and the result is the soul searching we see above in the questioner's letter. But during that time before Covid, it might be fair to say that Internationalism developed as a philosophy and almost as a psychology in and of itself. What were the features of that psychology?

-I have a right to freedom of movement;

-I have a right to get to work, even if that is abroad;

-I can skip to New York if I wish to, do so some shopping over a weekend;

-I am an international concept in myself;

-I have no lasting home except my shoes;

-I have shopped all my life, still have nothing to wear - hence my trips;

And so on und so weiter, as the German shopaholics might say, which is all fair enough.These are the benchmarks of that philosophy nay psychology of Internationalism as it has evolved over the 80s and 90s. Today we see how much it was ingrained in many psychologies and in many magazines, because once it was threatened and undermined by Covid and the various governments restrictions, then people began to feel they should assert their rights, even a right to international travel. Covid was a hard and harsh and hardy lesson for all travelling tourists suddenly to own and experience. It seemed that with Covid all those precious rights went out the window, especially for believers and avid devotees of the Philosophy of Internationalism. Different times now. Now the right to get to work has to be justified, despite appearing in the International Charter of Social and Political Rights not long ago, as more and more of the population confront Insulators on the roads of the country. It is a sudden change in the atmosphere. Rights - where are they now?