~~ The following was written in June 2020 ~~
I was thinking about travel. About how it's so often used as a status symbol, reinforcing the idea that the world is the playground of certain rich people. How the whole structure of tourism, as an activity - more importantly, as an industry - is a method of propping up powerful people's ideas of themselves. I was thinking about respect, about how hard it is to convey it as a traveler (perceived as, but distinct from, a tourist,) and as a white American. And then I had the though a nation founded on respect would not end up like this.
The attitudes are well-demonstrated through US domestic travel during the pandemic.
People going to beaches and summer homes as usual, or perhaps more forcefully than usual, asserting their entitlement in the form of freedom of movement, the same way colonists burst onto this so-called landscape and declared it a place of freedom while ignoring the fact that the entire place was already people's home.
A tourist goes somewhere to vacation, to seek exotic comfort (ie, pleasant relaxation that is comparable to home but purged of responsibilities) and a stimulation of the senses along preconceived channels of enjoyment: show me the ruins, the traditional dances, the things I've already seen pictures of while planning my trip.
A traveler, I like to believe, enters willingly into a situation of not knowing, seeks to learn, to see who the people are who live and think differently, and to meet them. To bring oneself in contact with someone else and share what each has to teach and learn.
Including but not restricted to the human inhabitants of a place - the traveler's teachers may be birds and animals, the sea, the air, the plants, the architecture, or the ancient markings of previous cultures. The traveler's request is please allow me to walk here awhile and absorb, with humility, what this place has to say.
Well, that's my ideal, anyway. There are not enough such travelers in the world.
Because of course the tourist brings more money, and tourism-the industry has to favor whomever is bringing in money.
Thus the feedback loop of entitlement: wealth and conspicuous consumption create ever more entitlement because they are given free reign to disregard local custom, or bend rules, or find loopholes for environmental protections. The rise of entitlement is dependent upon the decrease of respect.
Our nation was never about respect, (see black activist response to the 4th of July if you need clarification) and this has clearly led to the situation we're facing now. As many have said, the coronavirus is laying bare the rotten problems of the society and government, with inherent, enshrined inequality as the most degraded core. As with the tourism industry, in order to maintain comfort for the entitled, it is necessary to find legal loopholes and build intricate, obscuring edifices to protect the illusion of liberty and justice for all.
This inherent, inherited disrespect, with its commitment to delusion, is bringing the nation down now. It had already rotted out the inner workings and broken any systems with a pretense of fairness, and all it took was a so-called leader who is unwilling to pretend at being fair, who is simply voicing and embodying the self-serving, money-grubbing values that have risen the ranks of power in spite of language praising liberty, democracy and justice. Now the rotten fruit has burst and we are infected by its rank truth. Notably, the whitest of the white still want to deny it
- as if the virus itself were a symbol of white privilege, and to maintain the veneer of the status quo, the layer of shellac that holds it together, they have to ignore even the fact of a plague.
I think about travel because for much of my adult life I've been living outside the US, and visiting places other than where I was living. Experiencing other cultures has been a way of life. Now I'm tasked with experiencing American culture, to the exclusion of any other place, and it's forcing me to look at why there is so much exclusion in the experience of American culture, the extent to which it is defined by exclusion. Not that this doesn't occur elsewhere - but in places where it normally occurs, where xenophobia and a hierarchy of cultural purity are strong, there is usually not so rich a mix of people. To have a nation of such diversity simultaneous with an emphasis on homogenous culture made the US dangerously unhealthy, long before the virus came along. The power holders have never been able to acknowledge and embrace the multiplicity of peoples contributing to the American nation, and the struggle to maintain homogeneity of power and narrative has simply exhausted the potential that promoting a diversity of perspective would have given.
Travel within the US, September 2023 - Grand Tetons, ancestral land of many peoples
There is an urge to end on a positive note, to not say it's too late. And I will remind myself of what a friend told me: we have a moral obligation to be optimistic. My life has largely been a process of un-learning dominant cultural paradigms, and so I should be able to put my faith in this groundswell of the vocalized richness of potential in our country.
Combined with the devastation of the virus and the exposure of the ineptness of established systems, the current of Black activism can cut a new path for the flow of effort, lit up by truth.