Monday, 29 September 2008

  • Messages we don't post to Googlegroups









    I started to post to a thread on a group that is described as being "a listserv for everyone and anyone who wants to participate in building the infrastructure of Chicago's burning community and to assist with various creative burner endeavors and projects", entitled "who is not headed to the burn?", inviting people to come and help plan for the joint Chicago - Detroit Decompression.

    Yes, you read that correctly. Take a look at the map. Chicago and Detroit aren't really very close to each other, and the decompression was going to be held in Grand Junction, Michigan - which may sound like a short hop from Grant Park to a Californian, but poses a real problem for some of us who live here.

    I started to craft a response explaining why I would not attend a planning meeting for a decompression that would, once again, be held in a place to which I couldn't possibly get ....










    On Aug 23, 10:54 am, Devin Breen wrote:

    Hey!
     
    > Who's not going to the burn and will be
    > attending decomp and wants to do
    > DPW-related awesomeness?



    I'm not going to the burn, but I can think of at least a few reasons to not sign up for the DPW awesomeness, one of them being that as a person who can't drive, I'd have no way of getting to the decompression. I'm thinking that what would be really awesome would be if some day, a Chicago event actually took place in Chicago - not Kentucky, not Wisconsin, not Wyoming or Patagonia or wherever else the 2009 decompression will happen, but actually in Chicago. Just to be totally different.

    You guys do know that a lot of actual Chicagoans - and if you live in Michigan, you do not qualify, despite what a few people over on Yahoogroups seem to think - live in neighborhoods where a parking space costs as much as a small apartment, meaning that driving is not something that poor people get to do and middle class people have to think twice about, especially given the street parking situation? How many people do you know of who have so much money to toss around, that they'll get the equivalent of a second small home just to avoid taking the bus?

    Is Burning just for well-to-do hipsters of the correct political orientation, or should it be a little bit more inclusive than that?








    but I thought better of it. In part because I knew to expect a good trolling if I did post, the "local" Burning Man community having long been anything but inclusive or really local, for that matter, and let's face it - isolating and excluding the disabled (a mild case of cerebral palsy keeps me out of the driver's seat) is a grand American tradition, as I well should know. Which is what is happening when every single "local" event that gets held that is anything more than "let's go get some beer" gets held in another state. Wondering if the good folks in North Beach who appointed the local Chicago coordinator, as usual without asking any Chicagoans what they thought about the matter, know that Chicago is in Illinois, not Michigan?

    Sigh. Oh, well. If you were surprised to notice that, after over more years have passed since I wrote about circumstances in the local community, a city several times the size of San Francisco has to pool its resources with another city much larger than the homebase of Burning Man just to scrape together a decompression, this is one of the reasons why that would be the case.






    Originally posted to my blog at Tribe.net on August 25, 2008

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