The current decade will go down in history as “The Great Go-Away.”
Countries around the world are marching against immigration. Cities across Europe are marching against tourism. Even friends of mine like Marco Fioretti are now raging against “digital nomads,” folks who move to the boonies to get some online work done. (Image created by Firefly.)
“Certain towns are remote, idyllic places with a unique culture PRECISELY because there is nobody there doing remote work. The moment digital nomads come to such places in substantial numbers, they destroy them. Even if they do it to really settle and start a family.”
Writers have been doing this sort of thing for ages. Whether it’s Peter Mayle in Provence, Oliver Douglas in Green Acres, or Vincent Van Gogh in Arles, going “away” for inspiration is a trope as old as creation. I think even Homer moved to the countryside to finish The Odyssey because the crowds of fish sellers in Athens were getting too loud.
As long as there has been civilization, there have been civilized people looking for peace outside it. So long as there have been people like that, there have been locals who don’t like it. But only in our time has this become a nearly universal thing.
We don’t want immigrants. We don’t want tourists, and we don’t want visitors. All we want is to be left alone.
Really? Really. Oh, really?
Civilization Means Change
Civilization requires that you adapt to change, and it seems no one wants to do that right now. At the very moment when climate change has gone from threat to reality, with extreme weather everywhere killing millions in floods and fire, we’re all slamming the door shut on anyone outside our little bubbles.
It’s true that, in our moving around, we change the places we go to. But that’s how civilizations are built. It’s why we live twice as long as people did in the late 19th century. We live in a style of luxury Benjamin Franklin could never imagine, even in remote Chinese villages.
Yet the universal impulse today is to prevent that interplay. The ultimate expression of this may be our current President saying he wanted to stop all immigration from “Third World countries” in one breath, then saying in the next that he was popular in West Virginia and wanted to go there. News flash. To someone raised in Lagos, West Virginia is a Third World country. If you are living in Tokyo, West Virginia is the most exotic, and backward, place you can imagine.
The point is that “race mixing,” and cultural mixing, are inevitable. They are, in fact, highly desirable. How else do you think we’re going to get ourselves out of this mess, unless we all work together?
We’re not.
Next Year
For our vacation next year, I’m thinking my wife and I will spend a week in the Atlantic on what is called a “repositioning” cruise.
We’re going to get away from it all, while taking it all with us and pampering ourselves. I can hear your complaints now about the pollution and the environmental destruction our ship will cause as it glides along, with her reading and me searching my mind for things to write about. OK, I hear you.
But we’re going to go somewhere. Then, we’re going to go somewhere else, and I have news for y’all. I’m going to keep finding somewhere else to go, until the sky carries my body away. When I can no longer do it with my body I’ll do it online, as I have been doing since long before the Web was spun.
You will do the same. If you have an ounce of curiosity, if you have a soupcon of hope in your body, you’re going to see, hear, and learn from other people in other places. Because you’re human.
That’s the only way we get out of this mess we call civilization, by using our common humanity.
