As a professional travel writer, my job and personal passion is to encourage people to see more of the world, to diversify their views, and to stimulate the places they visit both economically and culturally with their own presence.
So it's always heartbreaking, if not angering, to see a city behave badly, as it were. To espouse ignorance or bigotry. And Arizona, boy oh boy, have you gone and done that.
As Bill Maher recently observed, there is no Nazi movie without the line "show me your papers." The phrase is as anti-freedom as it gets. It's scary. I can imagine some frail Holocaust survivor, of which there are few left, in Arizona being asked to "show me your papers." It wouldn't be a shining moment for them, that I can assure you.
And now this news??
I encourage Arizona's tourism department to make a stir. This is only going to hurt Arizona tourism-wise. Barring perhaps some white supremacist conventions, I can't see this being a draw for the state.
Funny enough I was stuck in Phoenix for a night in January when a storm canceled my connection flight and closed the airport. I thought, were this any other time, I would love to spend some time here. And I do want to go, to write about Arizona. But.... well, I'm not alone in saying that's going to wait.
Arizona, do whatever it takes and get rid of that law!
L
