Chris Amico: Journalist

Slide show: Rick Gunn reflects on his 25,000-mile bike ride through a world we shouldn’t fear.
Three years ago, Rick Gunn rode his bicycle across the Golden Gate Bridge in a heavy fog, pedaled down into San Francisco, took a ferry to Vallejo and turned east. From there, he crossed America, then Europe, Asia and Oceania in a 25,000-mile ride that ended Saturday back where the trip started.

At the end of this very long ride, Gunn has learned that the rest of the world is not something to fear. In detailed accounts of his travels posted online, there is an unfettered joy and unrelenting optimism in what Gunn sees. The journey has made Gunn, a former Castro Valley resident, a devout pacifist and left him with an abiding love for humanity.

The most dangerous place, Gunn says, is here at home in America. (more…)

The plaque reads: From this place on 28 June 1914 Gavrilo Princip assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian thrown Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia.

When I first told people that I was going to Belgrade, I expected the most common response to be, “Why?”

Why are you going to a country we fought a war with less than five years ago? Why do you want to see a city your country’s Air Force bombed while you were in high school? Why do you so desperately want to see hollowed-out buildings and the ruins of a Chinese embassy that was “accidentally” destroyed? Why on earth are you going to Belgrade?

I was over-generous in my expectations.

The most common question was, “Belgrade. Where is that again?”

We have forgotten another war. A decade of genocidal conflict has disappeared from American memory. While all eyes are focused on Iraq, we have forgotten another war from just five years ago. We have forgotten Yugoslavia. (more…)