Generational Tourism

(This blog is being posted by Lauren for Chris as blogger is blocked in Syria):

Last night I was awakened from a dead sleep at 3am by an explosion. Another quickly followed this, and in my semi conscious state my mind began to try and work out the possible cause. As much as I am ashamed to admit it one of my first lines of thought was, are we being bombed? After another one further away and with my brain now speeding up to full power I quickly dismissed this idea, as it didn’t actually hold much weight. It was far more likely that it had to do with Ramadan celebrations and as it turns out this was the case. It was the morning wake up for everyone so they could eat before call to prayer.

As I awoke this morning I actually felt quite foolish, and had it not been for the concerned looks exchanged with another road weary traveler during the night I likely would have felt downright embarrassed. Why is it that the instant something goes wrong we also assume the worst? What is mass media doing to our collective psyche?

Now, it is very easy to simply blatantly write off mass media as a force for evil without a second thought the same way it is to write off governments for all being the same. The truth is a much murkier subject, but in a lot of ways I feel like we also have ourselves to blame. The news may exist on the mantra of, “if it bleeds it leads”, and we have come to accept and expect this, but why is this the case? As a society we do not demand any better of the news so why would they go out of their way to provide it? In many ways we get the news we ask for and deserve.

Totally switching gears but at least staying in the same type of car another idea that has been floating around in the ether of people I have encountered on this trip is the idea of disaster tourism. In the past this term was reserved mostly for people who would travel to monuments of horrific events of the not so forgotten past. Going to a concentration camp in Germany, the Killing Fields in Cambodia, and even now New York to stare at the remains of the World Trade Center. On a whole this phenomena makes sense, these events were so horrific, so unthinkable, so un-human that people need to travel to them to try and understand how they could happen. We are opening the door to the worst humanity has done in order to try and take some good from it, to learn some lesson in hopes of never repeating it again. This idea starts to become a very gray area in my mind however when the monuments start charging admission and turns the area into an amusement park were people take funny pictures of themselves. I understand the need for people to get closure and move on, and see that by demystifying the past it loses its power, but I am beginning to question some of the motives behind it. I loathe the day where people will show up to a Holocaust museum and get their picture taken as Hitler kicking a Jewish person. If acceptance is the last stage of grieving however maybe that is how we will know we have truly moved on in our perverse world.

There is a new, possibly disturbing trend of disaster tourism emerging however, and I will admit that I am currently right in the thick of it. It seems like the new ‘in’ thing to do is to try and be a tourist in a war zone. Clearly at its best this idea can expose what is actually going on to the whole world and provide some much needed perspective. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that part of the reason some people do it is for the adrenaline kick and because it will make a great story when they get back home. It is easy to point fingers at video games and the news and say that we have all become desensitized to any real sort of violence and we feel invincible, but I think that is the easy answer.

Maybe this is the current generation's quest for a deeper meaning. The mysticism of the east has been explored and debunked and so we are turning to a new frontier to try and find ourselves in order to understand our place in the world.

I would like to think it is because we care, because we need to get beyond what we are being told by the mass media. We need to create our global community not just online but in person as well, and our global community really does include everyone. We need to try and touch the far corners of the globe not to steal mysticism or knowledge, or even to impose our own culture on others, but instead to connect with a living breathing human and their emotions. We not only want to talk of a better, united, global tomorrow, but to go out with action and seek it.

If this is the case then our Facebook friends become digital doorways into a massive commonwealth of the ideas and feelings of people all striving to make the world better in their own ways. We are willing to have conversations about taboo ideas and explore and explode their deeper meanings. We want nothing more than friendship as friendship is created out of understanding and trust.

I truly hope this is our reasoning behind our new form of exploration: war zone travel. There is nothing wrong with wanting to seek out new adventures and experiences, as long the reason isn’t entirely simply that of a self-serving adrenaline junkie looking for the next cool fix.

Ending on a positive note, at least for the large majority people I have met this is not the case. People traveling around are engaged and open and culturally sensitive. They want to observe, love, and help whenever they can. Still, it is important to reflect once in a while to make sure we don’t go too far off track. There is too much at stake to continue to make the mistakes of the past.