TOURISM

Every country in the world seems desperate to improve their Tourism Industry.  Tourists = Money.

What are “Tourists”?

Tourists are people who usually have (a lot) more money than the people they come to see.  They usually know little about the countries they go to, and don’t really want to know.  They prefer surfaces to knowledge, photos to communication, quick pleasure to intimacy.

Tourists disrupt daily life, distort values, and generally make locals who are just trying to survive, feel like animals in a zoo.  The zoo is their country and culture.

Tourists are most often insensitive to traditions delicately built-up over thousands of years, to customs different than their own, to food eaten by their unwitting hosts and the way it is to be eaten.

Tourists believe that their money can buy them respect, friendship, or at least subservience.  Although many tourists are decent people with caring hearts, their chosen act of using another culture for vacation and immediate gratification, dooms any real opportunity to touch the hearts and spirits of the “foreigners” they examine from a safe distance, who, of course, are not foreign.

Tourists feel and act superior to inhabitants of the lands they invade.  They frequently don’t mean to do this, but every moment they are judging, comparing, criticizing.  This is not the way to establish understanding or relationships.

Naturally, the locals are quietly judging, comparing, and criticizing back, often with the resentment of those who are voluntarily forced to continue the domination of colonialism, in order to live. 

Other than instant cash, tourists contribute nothing to the societies they intrude into, and, at best, only inspire changes that benefit governments, who are usually the oppressors.

Taiwan believes it can bring in Chinese, Japanese, and Westerners to fill the coffers emptied by unsound government spending and corruption.  Government, hotels (often owned by non-Taiwanese), over-priced restaurants, gift shops, airlines, and tour companies, celebrate every yearly increase in tourism. 

Many businesses and entrepreneurs believe there is no cost to the culture, no downside, no consequences to pumping up the Tourism Industry.  But there are….often catastrophic to nature, architecture, the Arts, language, education, beliefs, security, safety, neighborhoods, family values.  And the changes to a society are permanent.  The positive aspects of traditions and the old way of life can never be rebuilt, and very soon, not even remembered.

What is sadly ironic, is that many tourists themselves feel ill-at-ease as they visually and economically exploit others, whom they secretively suspect are happier than themselves.  Often trying to fill their unexplored dark psychological caverns, frantically trying to find meaning in their lives while pretending to relax, tourists come back to the exact same spot they left, with less money and perhaps debts, bolstered only with photos that no one really wants to see, and stories no one wants to hear. 

Travel is hard work, and often spins out of control, even with excess money and first-class everything.  Travel can destroy love, and even marriages.  The pleasure rush vanishes the next work week.  Reality is unforgiving.

It is true that some tourists love travel, and treat the host country and its inhabitants with friendliness and deep lasting respect.  I call them welcomed “visitors.”  This blog entry is not about them.

It seems easy for someone from a privileged, educated, well-fed background to attack tourism, which promises to feed hungrier people.  But selling a nation’s soul for a few gold coins can never bring solid nurturing changes that will last after the last cruise ship or Dreamliner takes off. 

When your magnificent, flawed culture is plundered of its exotic riches - constructed by time, sweat, and blood - tourists and their money will flee to the next new playland, beach, hot spring, museum, sex tour, casino, resort.  Locals will be left shell-shocked, wondering what hit them. 

Homes can be rebuilt after a tsunami. Cultures cannot be repaired after the Tourism Industry invades.