英语阅读：我为何抵制去美国旅行？

美联英语提供：英语阅读：我为何抵制去美国旅行？

小编给你一个美联英语官方试听课申请链接：http://www.meten.com/?tid=16-73374-0 My wife and children are American citizens. Every summer we fly from Europe to visit family. This year we won’t (cue shrugs from Trump supporters), mostly because I don’t want to holiday in Donald Trump’s America. Some of the other 77.5 million international visitors to the US in 2015 may feel similarly. Already, Trump is creating a new generation of anti-Americans. True, some despotic regimes such as Saudi Arabia also practise religious discrimination. But I don’t go on holiday in Saudi Arabia either, and I thought the US’s standards were higher. 我的妻子和孩子都是美国公民。每年夏季，我们都会从欧洲飞往美国看望家人。今年，我们不会去了(特朗普的支持者对此无所谓)，很大程度上是因为我不想在唐纳德?特朗普(Donald Trump)治下的美国度假。2015年前往美国旅游的国际游客有7750万人，其中一些游客可能有类似的感觉。特朗普已经创造了新一代的反美主义者。的确，沙特等一些专制政权也推行宗教歧视。但我也不去沙特度假，我认为美国的标准更高一些。

I was always pro-American. I grew up on wartime stories of chocolate-distributing GIs liberating European towns. In 1980, aged 10, I moved from the Netherlands to California with my parents and was enchanted. The houses were bigger than in cold, pinched Europe, the TV more fun, and Americans spoke to strangers on the street. Even ordinary people had big houses, and they routinely ate out. (In Europe in 1980, a restaurant meal was a big deal, reserved for occasions like your grandparents’ silver wedding anniversary or a cousin’s release from prison.)

我过去始终支持美国。我是在解放欧洲城镇的美国大兵给孩子们发巧克力的战时故事中长大的。1980年，当时10岁的我和父母从荷兰搬到加州，并为此感到欣喜若狂。美国的房子比寒冷窄仄的欧洲的房子大、电视更好看，而且美国人会与街上的陌生人说话。甚至普通人也有大房子，而且他们还定期下馆子(在1980年的欧洲，去饭馆吃饭是桩大事情，只有庆祝祖父母银婚纪念日或者亲戚刑满释放的时候才能成行)。

When I returned to the US as a student, I was enchanted again. By then I knew a bit

about the country’s troubled past, but most Americans seemed open about it and keen to improve. One of my professors had a set speech in which he called race “the unfinished business of American democracy”. Though he was a pompous charlatan, I bought his general thrust: the US gets better.

当我作为一名学生回到美国的时候，我再次欣喜若狂。那时我对美国的不堪历史有了一些了解，但大多数美国人似乎对此并不避讳，并渴望取得进步。我的一位教授在一场精心准备的演讲中将种族问题称为“美国民主的未竟事业”。尽管他是个装腔作势的假专家，但我认可他的演讲主旨：美国变得更好了。

In 2002 I met my wife, and began visiting the country with her. But I found it was getting worse. The post-9/11 terrorism panic added countless people to the nation’s security staff, many of whom liked fondling their gun holsters and yelling at people. TV news pumped fear and stupidity into the American ether. And you didn’t need to be Thomas Piketty to diagnose rising inequality. Rich white people (lots of them heirs) lived in gated communities, where poor non-white people guarded them against other poor non-white people. In America’s big liberal cities, with their non-racist, non-sexist speech codes designed to trip up the unwary, the rich sealed themselves off through house prices. The poor were free to wait tables, fight in Iraq and devote much of their remaining mindspace to worrying about health insurance. It’s true that inequality has risen across the west, but no country in the EU has a Gini coefficient of income inequality anywhere near as high as the US’s.

2002年，我遇到了我的妻子，开始和她一起在美国各地旅行。但我发现美国越来越糟。2001

年9/11恐怖袭击带来的恐慌让美国大幅增加了安保人员，其中许多人喜欢抚摸自己的枪套并对人大喊大叫。电视新闻向美国的空气中注入恐惧和愚昧。你不必是托马斯?皮凯蒂(Thomas Piketty)就能发现美国社会不平等现象日趋严重。富裕的白人(许多人的财富是继承而来)居住在封闭式社区中，而贫穷的有色人种给他们当保安，保护他们不受其他贫穷有色人种的攻击。美国奉行自由主义的大城市出台了不能涉及种族主义和性别歧视的言论准则，专门揪粗心者的错，富人们在这些城市借助房价将自己封闭起来。穷人有在餐厅当服务员、在伊拉克打仗、将剩下的精力主要用于操心医疗保险的“自由”。没错，整个西方的不平等现象都有所加剧，但欧盟哪个国家都没有美国那么高的基尼系数。

Driving through Georgia and South Carolina one recent summer, we’d pass a predominantly white town and, a few miles later, a much poorer black town. It reminded me of visits to my grandparents in apartheid South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. Back then, many people boycotted South Africa. My parents felt they should keep visiting their aged parents but, aged 16, for complicated teenage reasons, selfish as well as political, I decided to stop going.

我在近年的一个夏季驱车穿过佐治亚州和南加州，我们会在经过白人人口占绝大多数的城镇后，过几英里经过一个贫穷得多的黑人城镇。这让我想起了上世纪七八十年代，我们去看望居住在实行种族隔离制度的南非的祖父母。当时许多人抵制南非。我的父母觉得应该继续看望他们年迈的父母，但我16岁时，出于复杂的青春期原因(既有自私也有政治上的原因)，我决定不再去南非。

It’s easy to sneer that only hysterical liberals will stop visiting Trump’s US. But I never heard of anyone staying away from the US under George W Bush or from the UK since Brexit. I disagree with Brexit, but I accept that it’s a reasonable choice to