The great Jamaica Kincaid writes, in her book-length essay A SMALL PLACE, "A tourist is an ugly human being." It's a hard truth but a very important one, because it has to do with the way you see people and places, or don't see them. She goes on to write about the particular https://twitter.com/HNTurtledove/status/1380554797930012672

ugliness of being a tourist in a place where the people who live there do not have the means to become tourists somewhere else themselves. (If you haven't read her, go get this book, it is an amazing work, not too long and incredibly well-written as well as brilliant).

Disaster tourism is a special subset of this ugliness. It's normal to feel awe and amazement at massive natural events; how lucky we are to be able to see videos of them and learn from scientists who study them. Less natural is the celebrity pull of disasters that comes from

their breathless mediatization on the news. Yes, disasters are news, but consider the unhealthy pull to be near something famous. More importantly, consider HOW disasters are presented on the news: who is telling the story, whose losses are important, what numbers are given.

News shows calculate what information is important to their viewers, guess whether they will care about residents of a place they might have no connection to/about the evacuated tourist groups the might know someone in/about the potential for a sunny vacation later in the year

It's a problem, because it reinforces the impression that what they talk about IS what's important. When news shows assume that the people they're talking to don't have any connection to a small place, forgetting about diaspora and international access to websites, they imply

that there's no need to worry about that place. Ftr, I'm not subtweeting the NYT here; I haven't read the initial article at the top of the thread I QT'd, so I don't know if they committed this. The point is, we should never exacerbate that belief, that tendency.

We all have a connection to that place, to the people affected by any disaster. We care about all people. Don't forget it.

Because disasters happen everywhere, and in the midst of one it's very ugly to dismiss the suffering people are going through. And that dismissal is only allowed for certain types of places, the ones that are small and far away from you.
They're not far away from everyone.

So if the ugliness of tourists is partly in that physical demonstration of hierarchy, that ability to 1/take a vacation 2/travel 3/observe a place from the distance of not living there 4/maybe not see the people living in that place at all; disaster tourism is an even more dire

demonstration of that hierarchy, that power: not just to travel, but to think about leisure travel when people are hurting, when people physically cannot stay in their homes and are forcibly travel in uncertainty and danger, going not to a hotel but a shelter, not to relax but to

mourn. To be able to say things ignoring people's suffering because you think no one listening cares enough about them to call you on it. There are easy ways to comment on the spectacle of a volcanic eruption without erasing the people affected by it.

We erase people from news stories and natural events too often. Elide them into numbers without names or quotes, push them below information about assets or objectives, forget to mention them at all.

I might come back to this later, depending how angry I still am, but in the meantime: Read Jamaica Kincaid. While you're at it, read more Caribbean writers, like @RSAGarcia, @sillysyntax, @drkarenlord, @CadwellTurnbull, @tobiasbuckell, @ibizoboi, @ndennis_benn @BlairNecessitys