Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 1, 1994 TAG: 9408010025
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Monty S. Leitch
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
So much so, that the buzz words are now linked: "tourism 'n' economic development" - like "peaches 'n' cream." Or "stuff 'n' nonsense."
Since the "T 'n' ED" linkage first cropped up, I've found the notion peculiarly unsettling. Now, this Disney theme park business has brought me to a boil.
So I've been trying to explain, to my own satisfaction at least, why. Why shouldn't tourism provide economic benefits for a community? Why shouldn't we invite theme parks, fast-food joints, souvenir pavilions, strip malls and motel chains into our very back yards?
Of course, there are serious, if facile, answers (especially the way I've begged the questions): Such structures are, more often than not, ugly; they threaten the environment in myriad ways; they provide only low-paying jobs at best; and they end up costing their "host" communities more than they can ever repay.
But these answers don't address the issue at the level of my deepest perturbation: Is economic development a laudable goal in the first place? Isn't tourism, in and of itself, pernicious?
Now we're in the realm of values. And as your answers reflect your personal values, so do mine.
Thus, you should know that in my values system, the acquisition of money - purely for its own sake - is never a laudable goal. I find dollars and cents a deeply destructive yardstick for measuring the bottom line of any human endeavor.
Thus, the following, to my way of thinking, are not communitywide benefits: the provision of minimum-wage jobs, either in construction or service, so the city's unemployment rate drops; the development of commercial properties, so the town's sales-tax base expands, while its personal-property tax base shrinks; the provision of a few new management positions, so the county's high-end real-estate market "blossoms."
Schools and libraries are not funded by sales taxes. Minimum-wage earners and part-time workers do not buy more houses, more groceries or more books. Tourists do not pay property taxes, nor do they care one whit if the landfill behind their favorite attraction overflows with their garbage.
Furthermore, tourism is, essentially, a passive activity: an entertainment requiring nothing, in the way of actual involvement, from those who are entertained. You go, you look, you go home. Maybe you remember some historical fact. Maybe you don't.
Theme-park tourism requires even less of your brain. You go, you scream, you go home.
Oh. And you spend money. Lots and lots of money. That finds its way back to corporate headquarters faster than it found its way out of your pocket in the first place.
The primary goal of tourism is the spending of money. Does this, in any way, benefit humanity?
Does any community develop opportunities for its citizens by offering wearied travellers trivial ways to spend their money? Money that merely slides through town? Can theme parks add to the fund of human knowledge? Develop character? Preserve history?
I offer this from Mihaly Csikszentmihaly's book "Flow":
"In the past few centuries economic rationality has been so successful that we have come to take for granted that the 'bottom line' of any human effort is to be measured in dollars and cents. But an exclusively economic approach to life is profoundly irrational; the true bottom line consists in the quality and complexity of experience.
"A community should be judged good not because it is technologically advanced, or swimming in material riches; it is good if it offers people a chance to enjoy as many aspects of their lives as possible, while allowing them to develop their potential in the pursuit of ever greater challenges. ... [T]he true function of politics is not to make people more affluent ... but to let as many as possible enjoy an increasingly complex existence."
Do any of our politicians know this?
Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB