Month: February 2012

This week saw the celebration of International Polar Bear Day. Only a few thousand bears remain and they are already under threat as a result of the dwindling polar ice. With increasing pressure to exploit hugely risky oil and gas deposits in the Arctic Ocean, how long will it be before we have to witness these magnificent creatures marginalised even further and falling victim to the inevitable oil spills? Picture it.

One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.

Leo Tolstoy

A Journey, Part 3. The Crucible

On the afternoon of 12 February, having thawed for a few days at Nessebar, we crossed the border from Bulgaria into Turkey and headed for Istanbul. Entering the first Muslim country of our journey, we had no idea that we would spend the next four months waking almost every day to the muezzin’s call. Our route through Turkey would have us spending a few days each in Istanbul and Ankara before travelling down through Cappadocia to the Sea of Maramara and finally east to the border with Syria.

Istanbul is such a beautiful city and the sense of history is palpable. Capital of two of the most pervasive and powerful empires, first the Byzantium Empire as Constantinople and then the Ottoman Empire as Istanbul, she reigned supreme for over 1500 years. It was, quite literally, the centre of the world. With the city straddling the Bosphorous Strait – the metaphorical moat between Europe and Asia and the gateway to the Black Sea – it’s not hard to understand why. I could only imagine what this city must have been like in it’s heyday. While much of the splendour has been jaded and the beauty faded, the jewels of the city like Topkapı Palace, Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque stand as proud reminders of her former glory.

In keeping with the spirit of Istanbul, Turkey itself has long served as a melting pot of cultures and people. Although the Turks and Kurds make up the bulk of the population, there are sizable minorities of Greeks, Jews, and Armenians, and dozens of smaller ethnic minorities. We’ve become used to some ethnic diversity in our modern nations, but what’s different about Turkey is that many of these groups of people have been there for centuries or even millenia. Quite literally at the intersection of Europe, Asia, Arabia, and Africa, almost anyone who went anywhere passed through Turkey en-route and invariably left traces behind.

Ask any traveller what it is that draws them to travel and the answer will almost certainly be the experience of diversity. Whether in landscape, nature, food, or people, one gets perspectives on the road that would be hard or impossible to synthesize any other way. As we immerse ourselves in the different, our views can’t but change and be enriched.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness – Mark Twain

For all our differences as people, we’re so alike and I think that the essence of what we have in common is centered on love and compassion. Wherever in the world we are, people long for happiness. They love their families, want a better life for their children and want the world to be a better place. These are the ties that bind us. I seethe when I hear derogatory remarks directed at broad groups of people, be they Zimbabwean or Mexican, Jewish or Muslim. Such prejudices are abundant in almost every sector of society in every country and they are one of the great cancers that affect humanity and steer us away from our true selves.

The word inhuman is defined as “cruel, brutal, or lacking qualities of sympathy, pity, warmth, compassion, or the like”. It’s a lovely definition because it’s a succinct reminder that we cannot call ourselves human unless we have compassion at our core and that this is our natural state. Our prejudices stem from the warrior psyche, that part of us that mistrusts and alienates others so as to ultimately render them non-human and us at the same time as inhuman (synonyms: unfeeling, unsympathetic, cold, callous, hard, savage, brutish). When practicing prejudice or maligning a group of people, let’s not forget its origins and that it’s ultimately nothing less than a form of savagery.

From Istanbul, we travelled south to Ankara where we again tried and failed to get visas for Syria and the Sudan. There was so much conflicting information that it soon became clear that we would only find out whether we would get into Syria when we arrived at the border, sans-visa. From Ankara, it was on to staying in a cave in Cappadocia – a Lilliput-lunar-like wonderland where hundreds of people still live in caves carved out of huge ant-hill shaped rocks.

Mersin, located on Sea of Maramara, is one of Turkey’s largest ports and is off the main tourist routes. On reaching it, we’d already acquired a taste for middle-eastern desserts and, stopping into a pastry shop for knafeh and coffee, we got chatting to Mehmet, the owner. Off the tourist track, we’d found the Turks to be incredibly hospitable and friendly; I will never forget an evening at a tiny rustic locals-only eatery in Dalyan, near Çeşme a few years earlier, when the sparse-toothed, vested proprietor stood by our table with his glass of raki for the entire meal and toasted Salut! at every opportunity. Mehmet was no exception and before we knew it we’d accepted his invitation to experience real Turkish food that evening.

When travelling, and especially in a country like Turkey where an invitation to tea is often just a prelude to a hard sell, the easiest thing to do is to keep the shields up. We’d heard horror stories from Turks in Istanbul about travellers being held hostage and forced to sign credit card slips at gun-point after having accepted invitations into clubs and bars. Sometimes though, one has to make a leap of faith, follow one’s intuition and place one’s trust in another because it’s only when we do that we’re able to really overcome the barriers that separate us. But trust and vulnerability are inseparable and there was no small amount of trepidation before we met up with Mehmet later that afternoon and climbed into his car to experience the city he loved from his point of view. It was a night to remember as we moved from the restaurant – where he refused to let us pay a single lira – to bars, sharing stories and perspectives in broken English. None of it would have happened without his goodwill and our reciprocal trust.

Mersin is only a short distance from the Syrian border and on this day, 15 years ago, we arrived at the border and with minimal fuss obtained our visas and crossed into Syria heading for Aleppo.

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

Plato

A Journey, Part 2. Indoctrination and Freedom

Leaving Eger, we pushed east toward Debrecen and the Romanian border, crossing into Romania on 6 February and spending our first night in Cluj.  From there, we took the road through Sighişoara (once home to Vlad Dracul – Dracula’s father), and Brașov (the coldest I’ve ever been), to Bucharest. The Romanian countryside is absolutely spectacular, with vast plains and rolling hills covered in snow.  The roads, though, were potholed almost beyond repair and much of the visible infrastructure was completely dilapidated.  

We didn’t linger on this part of our journey through Romania and Bulgaria and it took us only a few days to reach Nessebar on the snow-free Black Sea coast. From our limited interaction with people in on route, we were struck by the difference in attitude between people here and those in the Western countries we’d travelled through before. The concept of customer service, for instance, was almost absent – not as a result of bad attitude, but rather because one got the impression that the people had probably never seen themselves as customers, or permitted themselves what we would consider normal customer expectations.

Seven years on from the Romanian Revolution of 1989 and Bulgaria’s transition to democracy in 1990, I got the impression of countries trying to come to terms with freedom and people coming to terms with their need to accept, adopt, and adapt to new roles, expectations, and attitudes. Although the change in doctrines in South Africa was very different to that in these countries, it was easy and natural for me to identify with what we experienced in Eastern Europe.

The doctrines of the societies in which we live define our norms and have an enormous impact on our thoughts and behaviour. Growing up in apartheid era South Africa, I’d had first hand experience of the shape shifting effects that a major change in doctrine brings about, as people like Mandela and Hani that we’d been indoctrinated to believe were terrorists, turned out to be moral heroes and champions of freedom. This has always served as an ominous reminder to me of the extent to which the prevailing doctrines can shape and constrain our thoughts, and of the need to look beyond the political and other agendas of the day and seek out one’s own truth.

It seems it’s harder to see the effects of a doctrine when you’re on the inside, and much easier to find fault with the doctrines of others. This is even more so when the press is muzzled or acts merely an agent of the politicians, as was largely the case in countries of the former communist bloc and in apartheid era South Africa. In this respect, it’s our individual freedoms in general and freedom of speech in particular form the bedrock of free society, and the current trend to curtail freedom both in South Africa and in other so called liberal democracies is deeply perplexing.

Here in South Africa, the strength of the ANC allowed it to muscle the Secrecy Bill through the National Assembly in November last year. This bill makes it a crime to possess or disclose classified state information, punishable by imprisonment for up to 25 years. Whether or not the disclosure is in the public interest is irrelevant. Hot on its heels, the proposed Spy Bill will bring about the formation of a powerful State Security Agency with powers, among other things, to tap the communications of ordinary citizens without a warrant. In the United States barely a month ago, President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law. This permits the Pentagon to kidnap and indefinitely detain and interrogate both foreigners and American citizens, without recourse to the law, right to a trial, or legal representation.  Hardly a murmur was raised as the American Bill of Rights of 1789 was effectively repealed. Recently, my sister reminded me of a fitting and haunting quote by Benjamin Franklin.

Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.

We’ve seen these types of laws before. They are reminiscent of those promulgated here, in South Africa, by the Nationalist government with it’s apartheid agenda, and by other counties before, on their descent into totalitarianism. What is the agenda now and what is the truth that needs to be suppressed? A tragic and common theme among virtually all of today’s liberal democracies, is that no matter which way the people vote, they get more of the same. Are we seeing the demise of democracy in the interests of the corporate-military-industrial agenda?

I remember vividly being at university in 1984 as the year came and went, without fanfare of course. When forecasting the future, we often tend to think that changes will happen more rapidly than they do in reality. Now more than ever, I feel the real danger of an Orwellian outcome.

Such an inspired talk by Shawn Achor on positivity and its impact on happiness and success.

How is it that some bands just have it?

Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.

Dr. Seuss

Tragedy and Triumph

Around 300BC, Aristotle defined the four major genres of literature as comedy, tragedy, epic poetry and lyric poetry.  Now we’ve added more, like the novel, but it’s fascinating to me that Aristotle chose those particular four.  

Of all the genres, it’s tragedy that resonates most with me and I’m sure this is true for many other people.  The fact that he included it at all shows that the concept of tragedy has been with us since our beginnings.  What defines tragedy?  It’s nothing but a seemingly inescapable sequence of events that we know will lead to an inevitably tragic conclusion.

I think the reason that we identify so strongly with tragedy is that we’re often immersed in it and surrounded by it in our everyday lives.  An article in the Guardian last week listed the top five regrets of the dying, according to palliative care nurse, Bronnie Ware. The top regret is I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. How true I sense this is, and how tragic to get to the end of one’s life with this regret.  And yet, we live our lives often not being true to ourselves. Despite a sense of knowing from deep within, we seem powerless to break out and so we go with the flow. Every one of the other four regrets she lists are in a similar vein and the result of similar tragedies that play their parts in our lives.

It doesn’t stop there.  We live in a world that is reeling under the pressures of our excesses. We know this and know that we’re part of the problem and yet feel somehow helpless and hopeless in the face of the spectres unravelling before us. We have species teetering on the brink of extinction, rain forests disappearing, glaciers receding. We desecrate nature, inflict unspeakable cruelty on animals and allow our fellow human beings to be subjected to war, abuse, and poverty. And we do it all by choice.  We can’t blame the politicians or the corporations – if they are responsible it’s only because we allowed it to happen. By our silence, our passivity, our lack of courage.  Is this not tragedy on a grand scale?  Is there any doubt at all about the tragic conclusions that will follow unless we change our ways?

I take my hope from the belief I have in our innate humanity.  If we can identify our tragedies, we have it within us to bring about their undoing.  As we face the storm, I can’t help feeling that perhaps our greatest hour lies ahead.

Amazing long exposure film of the night sky from the Atacama desert in Chile.

1 2