The world will be as one
Not quite the way Lennon envisioned in but an invisible virus will refine globalism, make us accountable, and make travel a richer, more immersive experience, but in smaller numbers
verance; something the new generation will need to learn.
If anything, this invisible virus has brought the world together and shown in one insouciantly savage act how vulnerable our planet is. Suddenly something Greta Thunberg has gone hoarse shouting about is staring us from our screens 24 hours a day. The bug cares nothing for borders, passport, race, ethnicity, colour, age, or wealth. It has been a great leveller of people and myths. There is a single planet. And it is time to mend it, from health and lifestyle, to addressing wasteful consumerism, divisive politics, supply chains and climate.
The mending happens with a changed worldview. While it is possible that the triumphal progress of globalism may come to a screeching halt with countries sealing borders and xenophobic nationalism rearing its head everywhere, it is more likely people and countries will realise they need each other to survive. Seemingly independent actions — even in obscure locations — have a ripple effect on others. Too many people have died for this not to be painfully obvious.
Travel is a powerful healing force as well as a disruptive agent that has in the same breath offered hope for orphaned Cambodian amputees as well as devastated fragile tribal ecosystems around the world with ignorant manners and a mistaken belief in the crusading might of the dollar and that all-important bucket-list selfie. No more trampling on people and their traditions. There is a need for sensible regulation to prevent over harvesting of tourism.
The world of tomorrow — and it’s right around the corner — must be calmer, saner, and more equitable. The anguish felt over the plight of frontline Wuhan doctors and Italian patients in streetside ICUS is a fraternal wake-up call. There is no us and them. And it has taken an existential threat to galvanise the world, discard old stereotypes, and help shed some of its vacuous opioid consumerism.
Despite the Wuhan-coronavirus baiting and the Us-germ-warfare-gonewrong counter, it is abundantly clear that the world is too deeply enmeshed in globalism and global supply chains to pull out in an instant or even contemplate such action.
Loved or hated, China has auth-ored much of the world’s recent prosperity, from brandcrazed shoppers in Hong Kong and luxury trippers in Bali to pharmaceutical supplies for much of the world from India to the USA. The iphone is not manufactured in a single place, nor is a B787. Intricately, embroidered dresses from Milan are often created off the sweat industry of nimble-fingered but underpaid children in Bangladesh or elsewhere. Parts for just about every musthave gadget, from solar panels to satellites, are universally sourced. We need each other as never before.
And that is the power of COVID-19 —to unite the world as a single home. It will change the way people “see” travel. No more should tourism be practised as a locust industry that depletes local resources and turns fine art into tat in an instant as the demand for tawdry gewgaws grows. No more can travel be a monoculture with hotels vying for just European guests or rich Japanese. Travel is for all.
When travellers of yore laboured across continents aboard a soot-spewing train, a cranky motorcar, or a sedate ship, the experience was gracious — a gentle incremental process, a growing relationship rather than a hurried one-night stand. People read up avidly on places and cultures and savoured the moment, the stories. It was immersive. It was the journey and not just the arrival.
The time has come to return to that enriching immersion in smaller numbers that do not overwhelm the destination, destroying the very things that drew us there in the first place.
The info-barrage on the web, much of it wacky, and designed for mass clicks, has reduced “education” to small sound bites, a snarky sentence in the Twittersphere, or a must-do Cappadocia Instagram pose. In all the primping and preening lands and peoples have disappeared. Lands and Peoples was a brilliant 1954 collection of handsomely bound volumes presenting the world with erudition and evocative photography. It sparked a profound curiosity and the travel bug in many.
It is time to rediscover this “lost chapter” with a vengeance. Do travel — when it becomes safe to do so — like it’s the last meal on earth. Only then are you going to truly relish the diversity on offer as you appreciate another paradox: how much we have in common with everyone else.