Innocence is kind of beautiful actually

I don't know why, but Locked Up Abroad is one of my comfort shows. I've watched every episode at least twice, and since there's a whole channel for it on Roku, I sometimes just let it play all day. I'm not sure what's so appealing about it as it's literally just the same drug smuggling story told by different people over eight seasons. It's always a person between 20-30 who feels "lost" in their life, decides to start traveling to "find" themselves, and then meets someone who's like, "Want to bring back a suspicious package from Brazil?"

How the story ends is inevitable, and I think there's a part of me who enjoys the schadenfreude of seeing entitled Americans getting locked up in third-world countries, especially the ones that are like: "How could they do this to ME??? 😭 All I did was smuggle 500 kilos of heroin and they got me locked up in here with criminals!!!"

However, not all the people featured on the show are complicit. Some of them just trust the wrong people, make stupid decisions, and naively think everything will be okay. These types of episodes are the hardest to watch cause it's like watching a small child attempt to cross a busy street when there's clearly a bus barreling toward them.

It's these episodes that have me screaming at the TV: "Just go home! You don't have to swallow those hashish pellets! Just grab your bag and leave the hotel! Don't trust these people!" And of course they swallow the pellets anyway as their "friends" take off in a getaway car. Meanwhile, they're arrested at the airport and locked up for 10 years.

I caught one episode recently I had never seen before that really encapsulated these types of people (and for once it wasn't about drugs). In the episode, two guys from the UK decide to travel to the Darién Gap to take pictures of orchids. Yes, the Darién Gap, the remote area that connects Colombia and Panama, one of the most dangerous places on Earth, and these two guys decide to go there to take pictures of flowers. As I was watching it, I wanted to bang my head on something. How dumb could you be?

On the show, the two men explain how they were warned several times by Colombian police before entering the Darién Gap that it was unsafe, but they chose to go in anyway. Needless to say, they were immediately kidnapped a few hours after entering the jungle and held for ransom for a whole year. Miraculously, the kidnappers let them go for unknown reasons.

In interviews, both guys seemed quite embarrassed by their stupidity. "We were very young," one guy said. "Very naive."

It was at this point I started to find the story devastating. Because as much as we like to laugh and roll our eyes at "idiots" who should've known better, there's also something beautiful and pure about people who don't view the world like that. Because innocence presumes all people have good intentions. They presume that people are logical and fair, like them. In the minds of innocents, why would anyone kill them for picking flowers? After all, they're not doing anything wrong. An innocent mind doesn't know that evilness doesn't work within the parameters of morality or fairness, and this is a cruel wake-up call for them. It's cruel because seeing the world through the eye of an innocent is how the world should be, but it isn't.

So why do we mock innocence? It's beautiful to be innocent, to look at the world with color and excitement, to not see danger and doom everywhere, to not be nihilistic, to not be rooting for death, to not be pessimistic or cynical, and then breathe these toxic emotions all over social media.

Whimsy is beautiful, loving nature is beautiful, idealism is beautiful. And as stupid as those two men were, by the time I finished the episode there was a part of me who wished there was still a part of me that was like that. Like most people, I grew out of it. Now I hate nature. I don't trust anyone. I think everywhere is dangerous. I'm cynical. I try to be optimistic, but only if it's practical and not too "pie in the sky." I get so annoyed at folks who refuse to live in reality. But maybe we all could learn to be a bit more innocent, to see the beauty in life and not only the ugly, terrible side of it.

But of course...within reason. Please don't go to the Darién Gap looking for flowers. 🤦‍♀️ Unless you want to win a Darwin Award.