"Experience has taught me that traveling educates only those who can be educated just as well by roaming around their own country."
The quote continues:
" By walking thirty miles anywhere in one's home region the man who is open-minded will see more and learn more than a thousand others will by running around the world. A trip to a Central American Jungle to watch how Natives behave near a bridge won't make you see either the jungle or the bridge or the Natives if you believe that the civilization you were born into is the only one that counts. Go and look around with the idea that everything you learned in school and college is wrong." (page 173)
This quote is from his book "A Bridge in the Jungle" (made into a much less well known movie). A Bridge in the Jungle reveals how an utterly impoverished community could be, nevertheless, rich in culture.
Treasure of the Sierra Madre was about how money changed men. When the three prospectors were poor, they were the best of buddies. When they became rich, Bogart became suspicious, miserly, and selfish until it cost him his life.
These in shorthand are some of the messages of B. Traven.
Thoreau wrote: "Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul".
Wealth is overrated. Better to achieve freedom, and to get it folks must free themselves from all of the shackles money and wealth can cast on them, whether due to their own wealth, or the wealth of others. The money of banks, corporations, and the wealthy is used to put chains made of consumer goods, and service industry jobs, and gasoline, and all of the stuff we need to buy or do in the "free market" on as many folks as possible.
And, better to achieve real economic security (to go with freedom) through the development of knowledge, skills, systems and technology that permit folks to take care of themselves and their communities, rather than rely on volatile investments in stocks, bonds, pensions, I.R.A.'s, 401k's, bank savings, insurance schemes, or any of the host of business mechanisms that provide fortunes for economic predators, but no security at all for the middle class they prey on.
