slate.com: Burning Man traditionally ends with the titular incineration of a massive human sculpture in the middle of the Black Rock Desert. This year, the annual hedonistic fire festival became more of a Fyre Festival (get it …???) as unexpected downpours turned the dusty plain into a field of muck, causing road closures that stranded tens of thousands of attendees in the mud.
2 comments:
I feel comfortable laughing knowing no one was killed in a weather related accident. Burning Man is not something I care about in the slightest, so I did not even realize it had happened this past weekend. But reading this article and a few others, I am reminded how many issues the festival has and highlights. The fact that it is on Ancestral Native land misappropriated from the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe is insane. The amount of greenhouse gasses produced to power air conditioners alone is more than what 20,000 cars produce in a year just so these wealthy tech bros can enjoy their party in the desert. Maybe the original ideals of the festival were more authentic, but the purpose and culture around it have changed enough that the event no longer exists in the same way. There is no respect for the land’s indigenous significance or that it is a state park: the festival barely passed last year’s cleanliness test.
I was hesitant about this article. It’s very common for my generation to make jokes about the misfortune of others and while a lot of the time I find it very funny I think there can be a point where it goes too far. I don’t like that a lot of these memes just use photos of people in the disaster at Burning Man and just captioned them. It felt a lot like just making fun of people’s struggles. I’m not sure why that’s a line that I draw. I would feel a lot better if they used “meme images” and captioned those about burning man instead of taking photos of people during the festival. However, that being said I am adamantly against the Burning Man festival. It is absolutely awful for the environment and takes place on Native ancestral lands so part of me wants to say they kinda got what they deserved, however someone died which nobody deserves. Hopefully this whole event will make people rethink the festival to make it more sustainable.
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