From Just Me
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Monthly Archives: September 2013
Peace Tourism
“Travel has become one of the great forces for peace and understanding of our time… As people move throughout the world and learn to know each other, to understand each other’s customs, and to appreciate the qualities of the individuals of each nation, we are building a level of international understanding which can sharply improve the attitude for world peace.”
President John F. Kennedy
From Tourism for Peace
Since 1980, the United Nations World Tourism Organization has celebrated World Tourism Day on September 27. Each year the World Tourism Day has a different theme:
2011: Tourism Linking Cultures
2012: Tourism and Energetic Sustainability
2013: Tourism and Water: Protecting our Common Future
I hope the theme of the 2014 day will be ‘Peace Tourism’ or ‘Tourism for Peace’.
Nuwan Herath provides a good overview if this relatively recent concept in his article “Peace Through Tourism”:
“Peace tourism intends to reduce root causes that create situations where violence has been perceived as inevitable. It is not a replacement for various other kinds of tourism practice, but is rather intended to be a facilitator to enhance sustainable development and positive peace through the tourism industry…”
It has been speculated that the industry will reach up to 1.56 billion tourists worldwide by 2020. With such a large number of people travelling around the globe, it is not surprising that scholars and other professionals involved in the tourism industry started looking at tourism’s potential for peace making. The major assumption behind the notion of peace tourism is that when people travel frequently all over the world, it helps them get to know new people, cultures, values etc. That experience is capable of increasing mutual understanding among people who have been living in diverse cultural backgrounds. Furthermore, such travel also benefits the host countries economically and politically.
However, there is an opposing view which claims tourism is not a generator of peace but a “beneficiary of peace.” Tourism is only possible in areas where peace is present; it is absent in war zones, and much diminished in areas of high conflict and tension. Additionally, tourism has been perceived as a way of exploiting local people and destinations through the “commoditization” of local cultures. This view identifies tourism as a new way of perpetuating western dominance in the developing world…
Each of these views holds some truth, one view being more accurate in some places, the other more accurate in others. A key question to answer is how the worldwide tourism industry could be redesigned to help sustain positive peace on all parts of the globe. A very challening question, but hopefully one day we’ll find a good solution for that.
Meanwhile let’s keep learning more about each other and our cultures while travelling the world – in real life as well as via the internet.
From Morocco Peace Tours
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On seeing
“Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing.”
Bill Cosby
From AllThingsLearning
“Seeing means perceiving reality as objectively as possible, and things as they are. It means X-ray eyes seeing through celebrities to products being marketed, through a board’s trusted politicians to finances lying hidden (seeing beyound the memes and viruses of the mind).
The greatest poets, scientists, entrepreneurs and managers are so because they see things others don’t, without social norms and herding behaviour blinding them.
Innovation involves seeing possibilities where others see nothing. Innovation can be a future vision of the unlooked for, longed for event that customers know cannot happen, until it happens.
Seeing involves contrarian spirit and unusual cultural backgrounds. Fish do not see the water they are swimming in. Most in mainstream cultures see only what surrounds them and are blinded by it. People from different cultures (and those with learning or other “disorders”) see different things, or the same things differently, and this gives insight. Ethnic minorities such as Lebanese, Armenian and Jewish people contribute disproportionately to business, science and creative endeavours. Nouriel Roubini, of Iranian Jewish descent predicted the bursting of the US housing bubble and the 2008 financial meltdown.
Some people within mainstream cultures do see more clearly than others. Charles Merrill (who founded Merrill Lynch) anticipated the 1929 crash. He doubted his own sanity because he disagreed with the collective “group wisdom.” Merrill could see, and also let others see. He was a leader in financial transparency, publishing an annual report that revealed his business’s true financial state, and let others see it.
It is important to see the world, not how others have modelled it, and to see the variance and not just the high salient extremes, to see through symptoms to underlying problems.
Seeing also involves granularity; the scale of what is seen, and the ability as William Blake:
“To see a world in a grain of sand,
and a heaven in a wild flower,
hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
and eternity in an hour”
(From “Essays on Management: On Seeing” by Peter Winsley)
From To see a world in a grain of sand
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Love your parents and treat them with loving care for you will only know their value when you see their empty chair
From the Best quotes about parents
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HAVE A SKIPPINGLY AWESOME WEEKEND!!!
“Adults aren’t generally struck with the urge to skip because their worries and burdens weigh them down and they forget that they can take themselves lightly.”
Jessi Lane Adams
“Skipping is jumping for joy, step after step…”
“Skipping turns –
moping into hoping,
pity into giddy,
sad into glad,
lazy into crazy,
old into bold,
tired into wired!”
Terri Guillemets
HAVE A SKIPPINGLY AWESOME WEEKEND TO EXERCISE YOUR HAPPINESS MUSCLES 🙂
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Friends give us the courage to lift the blinds on our hearts, to open up and show what we generally keep hidden from the rest of the world
From Friendship quotes
I rarely enjoy watching commercials and never drink beer, but this video did touch my heart. Hope you’ll enjoy it too 🙂
Have an awesome weekend. 🙂
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Scaring away our fears
“Fear is a vital response to physical and emotional danger—if we didn’t feel it, we couldn’t protect ourselves from legitimate threats. But often we fear situations that are far from life-or-death, and thus hang back for no good reason. Traumas or bad experiences can trigger a fear response within us that is hard to quell. Yet exposing ourselves to our personal demons is the best way to move past them…
There are only five basic fears, out of which almost all of our other so-called fears are manufactured. Those five basic fears are:
Extinction – fear of annihilation, of ceasing to exist…Consider that panicky feeling you get when you look over the edge of a high building.
Mutilation – fear of losing any part of our precious bodily structure; the thought of having our body’s boundaries invaded, or of losing the integrity of any organ, body part, or natural function. For example, anxiety about animals, such as bugs, spiders, snakes, and other creepy things arises from fear of mutilation.
Loss of Autonomy – fear of being immobilized, paralyzed, restricted, enveloped, overwhelmed, entrapped, imprisoned, smothered, or controlled by circumstances. In a physical form, it’s sometimes known as claustrophobia, but it also extends to social interactions and relationships.
Separation – fear of abandonment, rejection, and loss of connectedness – of becoming a non-person – not wanted, respected, or valued by anyone else. The “silent treatment,” when imposed by a group, can have a devastating psychological effect on the targeted person.
Ego-death – fear of humiliation, shame, or any other mechanism of profound self-disapproval that threatens the loss of integrity of the Self; fear of the shattering or disintegration of one’s constructed sense of lovability, capability, and worthiness.
That’s all – just those five.
Think about the various common labels we put on our fears. Start with the easy ones: fear of heights or falling is basically fear of extinction. Fear of failure? Read it as fear of ego-death. Fear of rejection? It’s fear of separation, and probably also fear of ego-death. The terror many people have at the idea of having to speak in public is basically fear of ego-death. Fear of intimacy, or “fear of commitment” is basically fear of losing one’s autonomy.
Some other emotions we know by various popular names are also expressions of these primary fears. If you track them down to their most basic levels, the basic fears show through. Jealousy, for example, is an expression of the fear of separation, or devaluation.
Shame and guilt express the fear – or the actual condition – of separation and even ego-death. The same is true for embarrassment and humiliation.
Fear is often the base emotion on which anger floats. Oppressed peoples rage against their oppressors because they fear – or actually experience – loss of autonomy and even ego-death. The destruction of a culture or a religion by an invading occupier may be experienced as a kind of collective ego-death. Those who make us fearful will also make us angry.
Religious bigotry and intolerance may express the fear of ego-death on a cosmic level, and can even extend to existential anxiety. “If my god isn’t the right god, or the best god, then I’ll be stuck without a god. Without god on my side, I’ll be at the mercy of the impersonal forces of the environment.”
Some of our fears, of course, have basic survival value. Others, however, are learned reflexes that can be weakened or re-learned…
When we begin to see fear and its companion emotions as basically information, we can think about them consciously. And the more clearly and calmly we can articulate the origins of the fear, the less our fears frighten us and control us.”
From The (Only) Five Basic Fears We All Live By
From Comic Relief
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The best thing a father and a mother can do for their children
“The best thing a father can do for his children is
to love their mother;
The best thing a mother can do for her children is
to love their father.”
From Family Love
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Education is a fundamental solution to poverty
“Think about it: Every educated person is not rich, but almost every educated person has a job and a way out of poverty. So education is a fundamental solution to poverty.”
Governor Kathleen Blanco
In this photo underprivileged Indian children attend a free school run under a metro bridge in New Delhi, India. At least 30 children living in the nearby slums have been receiving free education from this school for the last three years. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)
“For two hours every day, Rajesh Kumar Sharma, 40, leaves his job at a general store and meets under a metro bridge with dozens of children from New Delhi’s worst slums. There, the father of three teaches the kids math, science and social studies, using black boards that are painted on a building wall. He teaches them the basics in the hopes that they will be admitted to government-run schools in the near future.
“Whenever I passed by this area, I would notice that children were spending all their time in the fields or playing around,” Sharma told the Indian Express.
He was able to convince many of the children’s parents to get them out of the fields for a few hours to help them learn.
When he started the school in 2011, he had 140 students. The next year, 70 of them were admitted into government schools, Yahoo News reported.
“Our teacher has told us that when poverty strikes, you should open your mind, and that can be done only through education,” a student of Sharma’s named Abishek told the Indian Express.”
From Kindness Blog
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Sometimes we need the fog to remind ourselves that all of life is not black and white
“Sometimes we need the fog to remind ourselves that all of life is not black and white.”
Jonathan Lockwood Huie
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Otrazhenie 