Manifesto-Alex

Alex Stroud

Tourists Not Welcome

            All too many people today view the world through a screen of some sort, be it figurative or literal. More often than not, we use screens for the sake of diversion, a word that has two meanings in the context of human interactions. Diversion can mean ‘fun’ but simultaneously means ‘distraction’. Distraction from what? The real world? When we’re not on our computers, communicating with people we can’t touch via an incomprehensible computer language, we’re listening to our iPods, looking up cat videos on our phones, doing all we can to stay entertained and in our own sphere of awareness.  We see the annoyingly plucky Greenpeace solicitors obstructing our path trying as hard as they can to coerce money from our pockets, so we pop in our headphones and avert our eyes so that they don’t bother us. We take out our phones to look busy when we pass beggars, too attached to our spare change, just trying to get where we’re going as fast as possible.  Ours is a society that needs constant and fast entertainment, diversion, distraction from the real world, distraction from the monotony and trials of every day life. One of the most prominent of these diversions, at least as observed by those who live in areas that are not suburbs, is tourism. Before means of travelling long distances were created, before the advent of trains, automobiles and planes, the concept of tourism was simply travelling to the next town over for the day or enjoying a picnic down the road. A day trip was a big event, but was an honest means to simply experience the subtle amusements that one might miss during work hours. As people began to be able to travel greater distances, entrepreneurs began to capitalize on offering comfort to travelers visiting alien lands, providing  a feeling of familiarity, the feeling that they, for just a little while, could live like a “local”. However, what I have realized since I first started spending my vacations as a tourist, is that tourism is all a huge façade. My experience will probably make me seem spoiled, but it has helped me to see through all of the phoniness that one faces as a traveler. For anybody who has ever been on a Caribbean cruise, you may have noticed that from the time you are forced into having a blue-screened photograph taken on your way onto the ship until you can finally disembark and go home, your entire experience is being controlled. On a typical day at port, you wake up, apply your sunscreen, put on your tropical-themed garb, attempting to blend in with the locals while simultaneously protecting your pasty skin, pack your back pack with all of the Hammecher Schlemmer kit that you think you will definitely need, and grab huge breakfast at the overstocked, 40 ft long buffet table. You then disembark. Your key card is scanned, you walk down the gangplank, are forced to take a picture with a wacky person in a fur suit, and are then herded through a warehouse/mall that  features exclusively Jimmy Buffet themed bars, tacky, smutty t-shirt stores and duty-free shops. You are led onto a bus with tinted windows and full-blast a/c and are driven out through a security checkpoint- the only way out of and into the barbed-wire encased dock.  The bus takes you to your destination. You may drive through garbage-ridden streets, through a town made of dilapidated tin roofs and crumbling brick, devoid of anything considered by us to be the basics. But you ignore it and instead listen to the blasting reggae on the stereo, bask in the air conditioning, and enjoy your day as an islander. You are brought to a beach in front of a hotel where you will spend the afternoon face down in three-foot-deep ocean, breathing though a tube and staring at fish until the scheduled departure time, when you will be taken back to your multimillion-dollar floating fortress.  Sail away, go to sleep, wake up, and repeat.  Thousands of rich foreigners have entered someone’s home, treated it like their personal playground for a day, and then have left once they have had enough fun for one day.

While the deception in Chicago is not quite as obvious, it is still there. Millennium Park, full of public art, beautiful plants, fountains, nothing that you would find where people actually live.  The streets of the loop are kept immaculately clean, the planters hanging from the decorative lamps and built out of marble in the sidewalks kept watery and lush. All of it is constructed to create an illusion of wealth, prosperity, and might through the camera lens of a tourist. It’s the only place tourists go, the only place they know that exists of Chicago. The loop is the part of town where most of the hotels are, the area that all of the tours are confined to. Is the investment Chicago puts into its tourist traps even worth it? After the money goes through the tour companies, how much of it actually gets to the city government and how much of that money is actually used to benefit Chicago residents? How do we know that the money isn’t going to build more tourist traps, to clean up an area of the city that doesn’t need it?  I don’t know much about Chicago, or what one would consider to be the real Chicago, but whenever I leave the loop I can notice the changes. There are fewer chain-restaurants, no flower pots or huge neighborhood parks full of detailed landscaping. There are normal people, like any other, who probably live behind screens, going to work, doing chores, running errands. People living their boring, every day lives; lives probably not so different from any other Americans. The idea of tours is that you will learn something about the experience of local people, get a quick glimpse into the life and knowledge that a native enjoys, which is preposterous as, while the location has changed, people still lead the same lives, do the same things that they do at home. Their lives are not somehow better or more enriched than yours because they live in a different place. The place you live certainly defines a lot about how you are shaped when you grow up, but at the same time does not make you much different than anyone else.

The first step to breaking the screen that we live in is to stop taking pleasure in fakeness, in things that were created or have been hyped to merely attract tourists and that undermine the people that actually live in that area. If administrators put more money into benefiting residents, tourists could enjoy an experience that is both pleasing and candid and authentic. Perhaps then, true human interaction would occur. People from different backgrounds would mingle and exchange ideas; have conversations that they wouldn’t normally have sitting behind a tinted bus window. The elimination of falsehoods imposed on tourists would encourage them to actually explore, put themselves in an uncomfortable situation, and make them learn something.