Michael Reagan/Contributing Writer
What a welcome home.
A topless trans person proudly flashing a party on the White House lawn.
A mysterious bag of cocaine turning up in the West Wing.
A news report saying that Hunter Biden was being investigated by the Justice Department for violating the Mann Act by transporting prostitutes across state lines – and being investigated by the IRS for writing off the costs on his taxes.
Thanks to my wife’s job as a travel agent, I missed these latest national embarrassments by spending most of the last two weeks in sunny Egypt.
Instead of watching the liberal media pretend not to notice the Biden Family’s daily string of gaffes, blunders and scandals, I was exploring 4,000-year-old tombs, gawking at the Pyramids and being amazed by what I didn’t see in the streets and markets of downtown Cairo.
No homeless people living on the sidewalks.
No beggars or open drug markets.
No shootings or car-jackings outside my hotel – nothing to remind me of my homeland or hometown of Los Angeles.
The friendly and hard-working Egyptians have plenty of serious social, economic and political problems, including occasional acts of terrorism.
But after 4-5,000 years of bloody history, the Egyptians have – for now, anyway – figured how to put together a fairly prosperous and civilized Muslim society of 109 million people, including 10 million Christians.
Egypt is the safest nation in Africa and everything is really cheap if you are a tourist or an expatriate paying in U.S. dollars.
I learned a lot about Egypt’s past and present on my trip.
For example, I learned that one of the reasons it turned from a Christian nation to a 90% Muslim one after it was conquered by the Arabs long ago was tax policy.
After the cruel Muslim governments stopped killing, persecuting or enslaving Egypt’s Christians, they incentivized Christians to become Muslims by putting heavy taxes on them if they did not convert to Islam.
I also learned that Egypt’s people laugh at Americans for paying people not to work. They think we are crazy for encouraging unemployment, which we are.
Hearing this kind of criticism is why traveling to other countries will make you a better and smarter American.
You not only get to see other cultures and get to hear what foreigners think about America, you also get to see that other countries are doing things we either should do or once did.
When I went to Kenya, for example, I was surprised to learn that Kenya’s official language is English. I saw children in a school in the middle of a huge slum learning English and wearing uniforms.
Sometimes I think the people making our laws never go anywhere.
If they traveled more overseas, they’d see how many people are trying to become what we are – or what we were.
Our current leaders have been doing great damage to our society, the economy and our institutions – violating the basics of law and order, destroying the value of the dollar, ignoring the Constitution, discrediting the Supreme Court ….
But it’s still true that there’s no other country in the world like ours – or greater than ours.
If you want to learn about the greatness of America, I say, travel. Go visit another country.
Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to reagan@caglecartoons.com and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.