We’re on a plane heading to Japan. In about 14 hours, we’ll be in one of the most exciting cities on the face of the planet. I’ll be far away from home and even more happily, far, far away from work and everything related to it.

On the plane, I watched as the flight attendants bowed to us and served us all sorts of delicious things, from roasted and seasoned crunchy soybeans to katsu curry over rice, and I thought about all the people out there I’ve ever heard who have said they don’t like “any Asian food.” How deluded can they possibly be to completely X out an entire continent of hundreds of different cuisines of billions of people on this planet? It makes me sad to think that people can be that ignorant, but at the same time, I guess it doesn’t matter because they just miss out on something really great.

As I thought about this, I thought about a colleague of mine who is very Southern – conservative, pro guns, enjoys gender roles, is anti raising any minimum wage because why raise the minimum wage when corporations could just replace these people with machines? He’s completely unaware of cultures other than his own, which is really just white American. I remembered the other day when he was half joking around about being a red neck, and I had to immediately look away from him because I knew that if I didn’t, I ‘d probably have the most judgmental look on my face. Why would anyone be a self-professed “red neck” and proud of it? That’s like saying that you are a self-professed racist and have no shame. But on this flight, I thought about him and the people he surrounds himself with, and I realized that he’s the kind of person who would never want to travel to a place as amazing as Japan, or anywhere in Asia, for that matter. The world is this great big place that is just waiting to be explored, but not by people like him who live in an extremely small-minded world.