O O Ø O O O O
Green Field
Ruminations on the status quo.
For five of the last six days, I have been camped in a field with 5800 strangers at the Winnipeg folk festival. For five days I have been listening to musicians play and drummers drum; watching jugglers juggle, and dancers dance; gawking at glowbees glowing and fire-spinners spinning fire. And if I tired of the spectacle, I could leave the campground and head to the festival itself.
But for five days, something was bothering me, and I think I have finally nailed down what.
You would expect there to be blood and guts—fights and mayhem—death and dismemberment.
On Saturday night, the sirens began to sound. In the distance, we could make out sets of flashing lights—six in all. The six trucks pulled up to the base of Pope’s Hill in a cloud of dust, and a man pepper-sprayed, wrestled to the ground, and eventually, tossed into the back of a truck and driven off. The trucks and sirens left even more quickly than they had arrived, aided in part by the jeering crowd who were, to put it mildly, less than impressed by the show of authority.
It was not the incident itself that bothered me. It was the fact that, in four years of camping in that field with thousands upon thousands of strangers, that this was the first such incident that I had witnessed. What bothered me is that I found this lack of incident jarring.
Put another way, my gut felt as if the Saturday night sirens (instigated, as it turned out, by the beaning of a park ranger with a beer bottle) should have been an inevitability, not an exception. Honestly, if you put 5800 people in a field for five days and get them all liquored up, you would expect there to be blood and guts; fights and mayhem; death and dismemberment. Instead, we had dancing, glowing, fire-spinning and, yes, snack food.
Instead, we had dancing, glowing, fire-spinning and, yes, snack food.
And as my internal camera pulled back, and awkward realization set in, I found myself uncomfortable with my perceptions and the status quo.
Why do we debate the sanctity of marriage when two girls in love want to do it, but not when the disfunctional, heterosexual couple next door use their kids like pawns in a bitter game of post-nuptual chess?
Why are we jarred by the sight of a nipple on our televisions, but not that of an assault rifle?
Why do we vociferously oppose the decriminalization of a little green plant, while accepting the drunken hoards beating and killing each other nightly?
But most worrisome, now that I am back, are not the questions I have already asked; it is those I haven’t yet considered. Perhaps I’ll get to some of them next year. The forest is hard to see with all those pesky trees in the way.
But it seems somehow clearer from the middle of a green field in Winnipeg.
Tuesday, July 15, 2003
PD DCVIII