One point two trillion dollars. That’s how much money that the tourism sector is set to lose just because of a little flu bug. 1.2 trillion, that’s… wait a minute, twelve zeroes, so… 1’200’000’000’000.00 dollars US. That’s just about twice the annual US defence budget. That’s how much money that the tourism sector stands to have lost in just four months.
Now that’s just fucking sick. It’s the kind of money that becomes so stupidly astronomical that we can’t even grasp it. We could go to Mars with that kind of money. No, not just travel there, of course we could, and have. No, if we laid it all out in single dollar bills, we could actually build a fucking bridge to Mars. That’s how much money that is. A space-bridge to Mars kinda much. It’d be a flimsy bridge, and I guess you’d have to use some pretty strong wire to rig it all up, but… nevermind. That’s beside the point. That’s a lot of money to miss out on in a four month period. You could forget to turn your light bulb off for a 50 billion years long vacation for that kind of money. It’s fucking sick.
You know what’s also fucking sick? That we, consumers, spend that much on just flitting about the planet all willy-nilly-like. Some 8’000 hotels in the US alone seem to be shutting their doors. Airlines are shutting down, closing down routes, and stranding aircraft left and right. And the number of people left without a job, without an income, are beyond count (unlike the apparently very countable 1.2 trillion dollars).
And maybe that’s not such a bad thing…
I love travelling. I love just sitting at the airport, waiting, knowing that I’m on my way somewhere. I think travelling broadens a person’s horizons, and thus strengthens their immune system to The Dumb[tm]. Travelling is good for the soul, if there’s such a thing.
That said, I think that the way we do it, and the reason why most people do it, isn’t very healthy… To some, travelling is about new experiences. Broadening horizons, expanding cognition, observing alternatives to our own little world. But many more, I believe, miss the point. They travel not to become better, but to seem better. They wallow in the extravagance of travelling, believing that seeming is being. They totter hither and tither with their selfie-sticks, more concerned about letting people back home witness their freedom, and wear their worn passports and novelty t-shirts like medals. To these, it seems, travelling is a luxury item to flaunt to the world to try and convince themselves and everyone around them that they’re special.
Another large group, those that may very well be the bread and butter of the travelling industry, travel just to escape. Escape the monotony of their lives. They partake of the blessing to, once a year, be able to go somewhere else, just to imagine themselves seem a little more alive. And usually, they go to the same old places. From Sweden, during the 80’s and 90’s, we travelled to Mallorca or Crete or some other mediterranean island. Since the 00’s, we travelled to Thailand. Every year, every summer, like clockwork.
Some ink-slinging blowhard once said that it is the journey that’s important; not the destination. And that’s been lost, especially with the availability of air travel. We conk down in an aluminum hell-tube for a few hours, and then step out into a new and exotic location. That’s not really journeying as much as it is really shitty teleportation.
But following this new world order for travelling, out of the wood work crawls pundits and classist academics, bemoaning the idea that flying and travelling may become so much more expensive in the near future. That such a development, with fewer destinations and higher prices, will cause a new class divide in society. A divide between the cans and cannots; those that make enough money to be able to flit about, and those that toil beneath the sun, bound to the earth, like serfs. Theses voices echo from the thin confines of a socialist dogma, fearing the return of some class society that never really disappeared to begin with. As if the equality of vacation options available to a population was the most important metric to retain following a collapse of the tourism industry.
And while the post-colonialists whine that their privileged middle class may lose some benefits, I’d like to point out to these spoilt voices that there are far worse effects from the lack of affordable tourism than some shattered veneer of equality. For example, the resurgence of poaching and illegal hunting now that local denizens no longer profit off of endangered spieces’ by letting white folks come take pictures or buy an easy trophy kill.
Still… I would argue that a swift economic kick in the nuts to the global tourism trade isn’t such a bad thing. Those that stand to really gain from their travelling experiences don’t really need an airplane ticket to do so. And it’s really not the responsibility of the tourism trade to stop poaching by outbidding outdated Asian mysticism; that’s a job for local governments and the sole responsibility of the heartless desires of eastern markets. Because the truth is that all that travelling, all those travel blogs and all those Facebook bragging rights, they come at a cost. A cost to the environment. A cost to public health. And sometimes also a very tangible cost to the locals that we deign to crash in on.
And truth be told, those concerns are much more important than your Instagram account, your escape from your sordid reality, or your precious class idenity. It’s all a matter of priorities. And I don’t think that anyone’s precious ego is more important than a chance to curb our addiction to unsustainability.
/Sebastian Lindberg 28/7-2020
WastedWords 