In 2008 I decided to stop watching the news, witch years later lead to also stopping to listen to the radio, watch or have a television or follow people who comment on politics and football in the social networks. The explanation is simple: incompatibility of the beginnings of my executive career, full of hope and ideas, with the heyday of the sub-prime crisis. In the hotel where I worked, cost-cutting and layoffs were the daily agenda, my boyfriend of the time worked with financial markets, and my recently retired father knew so much about the newspapers that became a messenger of misery. I was surrounded by bad news and the permanent fear of a dark future, which did not really reflect my reality or that of my circle. My peers called me “radical” for the decision and, ironically, there were heated discussions about me not wanting to discuss certain issues. It is true that if, on the one hand, I was seeking a more positive environment, on the other, it was the result of me not knowing how to react to the fact that the only social paradigm I knew was giving clear signals of failure. I felt overwhelmed by the amount of information that I needed to scan in order to build an opinion on the state of the world, and I gave up. I adopted the strategy of having a small environmental and social footprint myself, being as quiet as possible about all the rest of the world. I lived this way for many years, happily discovering that the fact that I didn’t want to know what was happening little or nothing interfered with what was happening, and I was relieved of the responsibility: as I did not know, I had nothing to do with it, and whatever happened on the planet, it was not my fault. Until one day, while travelling, of course!
The first thought came to me while I was in Nepal. In a sequence of erratic events, I became close to members of the quite popular band Mukti & The Revival and ended up on a short road trip with them. I was sitting at a table, late in the night, in a random roadside restaurant in the Himalayas with a group of rock veterans, giving opinions either on the musical alignment for the next day or on how the street children could be taken care of. Such opinions, based on nothing, to be listened to by those men made me realize the privilege of being born European, white and in the twenty-first century. How many women in my ancestry might have wanted to explore the world and themselves, but because they were a property of their fathers or their husbands, the only option would be to flee? How many have also wanted to give opinions based on nothing, and most important, how many of them have kept really useful thoughts unspoken? And how many women still live this today, because their gender, race, nationality, rules of conduct or social condition limit them? A traditional Nepalese woman would probably not be heard in that context, even though her knowledge was broader than mine, for that is a context that is unappropriated for them.
When I realized my privilege, I also realized how serious my freedom contains. I had a perception of how having had an education that allows me to express myself in several languages, to have access and knowledge of digital means to reach thousands of people, to be able to move freely around the planet with a passport that is welcome everywhere, all this comprises a responsibility and brings a mission. At that moment I understood, and I integrated, how I can get to the places where those women cannot, and say what they have to shut up. Those women, and those men, those children, those animals, or the most fragile and exposed corners of this planet.
I was resisting the news about the world, and while travelling I ended up seeing them live broadcasted, featuring human inequalities and attacks on the ecosystem and biosphere. By sitting among the rock-stars, I also saw how I could more easily than others spread a message, in the hope that some of the news will gradually change. Since that day there is a specific intention in most of my communication, and existence. Believing in the deception that what I do only concerns myself is naive; I know that there are tentacles in all my actions and an intrinsic relation between all things. For the same reason, to believe that one must care only for our issues is another fallacy, which until then I did not see. I believed that if I had a minimal impact I was already doing my share, and I did not have to do anything about the others. It’s in some ways true because I do not have to do anything. Only, I can, and some others cannot, and there is a heavy consequence of these spontaneous gains of consciousness: there are things that are ever again unseen, and I have never stopped seeing that we are together here.
I also gained a more mature view of how power serves to change the news. The great influencers and decision-makers, public figures, politicians, and corporations, have a far more immediate and far-reaching impact than the European, educated, from the 21st century, yet a common person. I remain unavailable to invest the energy requested to understand the global geopolitical situation, and I maintain little or no interest in collaborating with large multinationals, and I have stopped resisting them. If we insist on the idea that politicians are corrupt and that power is vicious, that is what we are going to perpetuate, because few well-intended people will be willing to receive this reputation. Today I carry out the idea that there are people invested in the benefit of all everywhere, and I give my heartfelt thanks to all of them. I continue to live the news, instead of watching them, wherever I can, around the world.
Liliana Ascensão is a tour leader at The Wanderlust, get to know some of her trips.
Cover photo by Tânia Neves, from Kagbeni, an Hymalian village.
