A July 4 Associated Press article contains the following text: "Five police officers and three 911 dispatchers will face disciplinary action for failing to do their jobs during a series of attacks on women . . . last month . . . . one lieutenant, one sergeant and three officers . . . face unspecified disciplinary actions for either engaging in acts of misconduct or failing to help several women . . . Six of 59 alleged victims have claimed officers ignored their pleas for help. . . . Among the victims were a 14-year-old girl, three British tourists and a French couple on their honeymoon."

In an earlier story, from another news source, it emerges that a large number of police were involved and most acted appropriately. Thus, a few bad apples on the police force are facing disciplinary action. One of the responsible policemen said that "he ran three blocks to help one of the first victims that came forward, a British tourist. 'She was hysterical,' he said. 'She was crying. She was shaken up.' "

Several women were allegedly raped. A number of the over 20 attackers have been charged with sexual abuse, in a series of events that took place not far from a major hotel.

If you watch TV Headline News you have heard all about this event; so why am I going on about it? Because several tourists had their vacations ruined by the trouble-makers, and some were confronted with robbery or a form of sexual assault. What was not written about tourism in connection with this incident is the subject of the discussion that follows.

If you do not watch TV news you may not have heard about this event, and by now you must be saying to yourself, "this must be in some Caribbean island, some tourist trap where the natives are too stupid to know the first thing about how to be gracious hosts to the people bringing in scarce foreign exchange into their needy country. Another paradise lost. "

But this was not a sun spot. This was New York City.

And New York is not alone as a major developed-country tourist destination where travellers need to take specific precautions.

On July 17, Ps Inform, which provides emailed news to people in the travel industry, circulated an item entitled "Crime alerts for European cities". The text includes the following, which is said to have come from the New York Times: "Nothing spoils a client's vacation quicker than becoming a crime victim during a trip. Knowledge of crime trends can help your clients complete their travels in safety. . . .

Rolex muggers" are again active in London, so clients with expensive timepieces should leave them at home or at least not make a show of them in Hampstea, Knightsbridge and Regent's Park. The city is also reporting increased problems with child pickpockets and sexual assaults late at night in unlicensed cabs.

On the continent, Rome continues to have less severe crime than other major cities, but petty crimes like pickpocketing continue to thrive. Gangs of small children actively ply their criminal trade on buses, particularly the No. 64 bus from the Termini train station to the Vatican."

One thing the foregoing stories have in common is that they have not triggered a spate learned media articles about how paradise has now been lost in New York or London, and how tourists should now be thinking twice about whether to go to those places.

Had these events taken place in a Caribbean sun spot, the media reaction would have been entirely different.

Here are two examples.

A June 9th Associated Press article carries the following headline: "Paradise Lost? Recent Slayings Mar Pristine Reputation . . . The recent slayings in Costa Rica of two American tourists, including an Ohio college student, tarnished the Central American country's formerly safe reputation."

Now no one wants to make light of these scary events. But how did we get to the point of building the reputation of a country around the idea that people traveling there are safe from being murdered?

Is any one safe from being murdered in her or his own home?

Not even the President enjoys safety from being murdered, as John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy taught us so well.

Here is another example.

A May 1st article copyrighted by APB Multimedia Inc. has this headline "Big Trouble in American Paradise[.] High Murder Rate Plagues U.S. Virgin Islands . . . Here in paradise, there are 30.4 murders for every 100,000 people. Compare that to Los Angeles, which has 10.4 murders per 100,000 citizens, or New York City, which has only 8.6 homicides . . . So far the carnage has been kept secret from the more than 10,000 cruise ship passengers and hotel guests who flock to the U.S. Virgin Islands daily. But it is just a matter of time before the violence spills over and affects the economy of these islands. "

No one can sleep soundly upon contemplating these murders, and least of all murders that touch close to home in terms of friends and family being killed. No one can be complacent about these scary events.

But the simple fact is that if the murder rate in the whole U.S. Virgin Islands is 30 in 100,000 per year, the rate for tourists visiting the U.S. Virgin Islands has got to be FAR LOWER than 30 in 100,000. And that for reasons too obvious to merit further comment.

Therefore, if you visited the U.S. Virgin Islands as a tourist for three weeks out of a whole year the probability of your returning home is distinctly higher that 0.999999 -- in other words you are practically certain to return home despite the murder rate just quoted.

Why has this simple fact so eluded the writer that he felt he had to broadcast the speculation that paradise has now been lost in the U.,S. Virgin Islands and that "carnage" would now spill over from among the natives and affect tourists?

Because, I hypothesize, certain parties in the tourist industry have relied upon SELLING MISLEADING DREAMS, rather than reality, to their clients. And part of the sold dream is the notion that you are giving up a few thousand dollars of your hard-earned money so as to escape your mundane daily life and be carried off in splendor into some "safe" paradise for three weeks.

It is worth noting that the image of the safe paradise could not have been propagated by the local residents of the sun spots, excepting those who have been part of the same tourist industry bent on selling misleading dreams rather than reality.

Images are effectively spread only by sources with high believability, and those sources must have the means to broadcast the images.

In most sun spots, the vast majority of the local residents have always been poverty stricken (by the standards of the North) and have always lived from hand to mouth. The relative few who have been lucky to escape that kind of life know from personal experience what it means to rub shoulders almost daily with the less fortunate among them, realizing fully that the less fortunate will 'snatch and grab' when the opportunity arises. So those people would never have created the image that their sun spot was a safe paradise.

The image was created by the people who stood the most to gain money in their pockets by persuading the buyers of tourist packages that they were going to "a safe paradise on earth, where they could let their hair down and just have fun".

This hypothesis came to mind strongly when I read another Ps Inform email which said that there had been some trouble in Greece, but now "agents" had reported that the trouble was over and 'Greece was now safe for travel' (this is not an exact quote, but it is close).

On reading that remark, I asked myself this question: "On what evidence could agents be correct that Greece is now safe for travel? Why should agents be so anxious to say anything about whether or not Greece is safe or not safe? Don't they know that every place on earth has things about it that can create risks to safety as well as things about it that may be enjoyed by some people?"

Is your local town or village safe? If you say 'yes', how do you know you are correct?

If you drink water from your tap how do you know it is safe? The 18 people who just died in Walkerton, Ontario, from drinking bad water surely thought their water was safe!

When you walk the street or drive your car in your "safe" town, how do you know that the next minute you will not be killed in an accident?

The fact is you know NONE of these things. RISKS TO SAFETY ARE WITH YOU ALL THE TIME, EVERYWHERE YOU GO. (Yes, "some places are more risky than others", as you say.)

So why should the professionals in one industry indulge in the myth-making that's involved by selling people tourist packages and assuring them that they are "safe in place X but not in place Y"? I feel it is because selling dreams historically became an integral part of the mass-marketing of tourism since the 1960s.

But isn't there something badly wrong when more than one dozen women can be allegedly raped in New York City in one park on one day, including tourists, and no one writes about how "paradise is now lost in New York", but a similar incident in a sun spot would call forth reams of media commentary about how paradise was now lost in that sun spot? In fact, the local Minister of Tourism and other high officials would surely be on a plane soon after such an event, rushing off to the North to try and restore calm concerning the image of their country.

Why should the sun spots have to carry this industry-created monkey on their backs, when New York is not being expected to do so?

Here is a piece of reality. People close to me are going shopping in New York in August. I will show them these stories I found on the web. Do you think they will say "oh boy, we had better find a safe place to shop"? Not a chance.

I will get a lecture on how no place is safe, and people have to get on with their lives knowing that everything they do has risk attached to it.

Such is the size of the monkey on the back of a sun spot, however, that if those stories had come from a sun spot they were planning to visit, I expect they would sit down and carefully "look for safe place" for their vacation!

Something is wrong with this picture.

Our images of the world are governed by a few influential centres in whom we have invested high believability, and they can cause us to have totally wrong views of reality. (Witch doctors are alive and well among us, folks.) To be well informed, you must go beyond these influential parties and gather information from much wider sources, and when you do that you need to free your mind of the mental shackles created by the paradigms and criteria of those influential sources. (More on this important task in future articles.)

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