#but also kiddos nobody's breaking out any guillotines

[littlestickfish]

I have had less than charitable opinions of Burning Man largely for the environmental impact and habitual trespassing onto neighboring Native lands, irrespective of the Eat The Rich of it all. However, I'm human and a seamstress/costumer and the outfits and custom vehicles are fire, and I appreciate the work that goes into something like that, as well as the romance of Mad Maxing it up in the desert.

What this post has taught me is that we need to be able to have all parts of this conversation at once without getting sidetracked by pet issues and look at things in context.

Point: Not everyone there is insanely rich. We should be mindful that our choices in what we save for and spend on are not everyone else's. Making your moped into a giant mechanized snail would be insanely fun. Putting together a killer post-discopocalyptic costume would be insanely fun. Camping out under the stars is fun, too. It is understandable for people to want to have fun no matter who they are.

Point: We have no way of knowing the income tax bracket of anyone in attendance, and from this account it probably varies too widely for trying to get us anywhere. It is pointless to harp on this as if we have actual data because we don't.

Point: The footprint of Burning Man is not justified by the joy anyone derives from being there. It sounds like a blast, but I would never do it because it's detrimental and disrespectful to the environment. Many people have formed negative opinions of the event based on this, and that IS justified. The environmental impact of Burning Man and the waste people who have the means afford to do so up and abandon in the desert has been a problem reported on for several years now. I can't go to a jetty in the Gulf without cleaning up a bag of abandoned beer cans from the rocks, I shudder to think what that area looks like after that kind of activity.

Point: The present crisis is the product of having more fun than sense. To be that surrounded by desert requires stranding oneself in said desert, which is inadvisable unless you have survival training, and sometimes even if you do. No amount of portapotties is going to ensure you have a safe and pleasant stay in the desert, or last you long if the worst happens. As it has. I was taught this as a young girl in Scouts: plan ahead when you go into the wild, and have at least one backup plan if things go sideways. Don't get too comfortable, because the wild is bigger, stronger, and older than you are. Years and years of partying in the wild without incident led people to get way too comfortable.

Point: The "protesters" made just as much a nuisance of themselves to the Native population as the partygoers, were also a bunch of white people yeeting themselves into the desert with no plan, and deserve no more sympathy than the partygoers.

Point: The cognitive dissonance of "I am progressive because I am upset at people suffering and dying therefore I want another set of people to suffer and die" is disturbing, and in this instance the idea of an appropriate target is wildly distorted. My journey on the left has been tumultuous. I started among the socialists but grew frustrated by their outmoded tactics. I moved left to the communists who by and large were pleasant company, but more theoretical than practical. The anarchists promised action. It sounded optimal.

What I found with them was not action. It was increasingly more murderous fantasies never acted on because the fantasy was more satisfying and lasted longer. It was misdirected rage (Veterans? Really? Most of whom got sucked into it on promises of job training with civilian applications and money for college? Are we going to set retirees on fire for investing their savings in a boiler room fraud scheme over the phone on the promise of similar security in life?) reductive thinking (shut up and let me watch Nash Bridges, it's Cheech Marin, it's fiction ffs, and my blorbo is Angel anyway) and bad strategy (yes voting does help, even a dumb old liberal is going to make it easier for you to Direct ActionTM than Ron DeSantis). I'm back in communist orbit, needless to say.

At least the communists have the music.

Point: "Eat The Middle Class" doesn't have the same ring to it, does it? "Eat The Poor Who Can Budget," doesn't, either. Kids, y'all should think about that. And shit like "liberals get the wall too" should give anybody pause. Yeah, it's said in jest, but why is there a wall at all, why are we so obsessed with having a wall? It's disturbing that this is a joking matter to some and more disturbing that it might be quite serious to others.

Point: I also see young people falling into that vortex of comfortable murder thoughts that make you feel powerful and like the inevitable righteous victor and just sitting in it forever when they could be contributing to various progressive causes in much more meaningful ways, and that worries me. Young leftists becoming absorbed in fake-murderous fantasies until the actually-murderous forces of authoritarianism wipe us all out. The proverbial mantis stalking the cicada, just fixated enough on its target to not see the oriole until it's too late.

Seeing the notes on posts about the Burning Man Debacle™ and for fucks sake I am taking the phrase 'eat the rich' away from y'all until you can CORRECTLY IDENTIFY the rich

Rich is 'arrived by way of their private jet', is 'dropped $500k on a submarine ticket', is '$500 is a rounding error'.

'$500 dollars for a nine day event they must all be rich white people' no you reactionary rotten potato that is actually an entirely reasonable price for an entirely normal person to pay for an annual event! $500 over the course of a year is approximately equivalent to one big takeout a month! Being able to afford that doesn't make you rich it makes you probably not poor! The 'rich or poor' narrative is a false dichotomy that completely excludes the fact that 'richness' or 'poorness' is a SCALE! It's not fucking categorical! You don't one day magically flip a switch and go from 'poor' to 'rich' or vice versa you see incremental changes over time! Wealth distribution is a (these days, admittedly, rather wonky) motherfucking BELL CURVE! . The fact that capitalism is driving more and more people to either extreme of said curve is just evidence of a broken system, but it doesn't change the fact that most people should have a decent amount of disposable income!

The fact that many people don't have said disposable income doesn't magically make the ones that do 'rich' it makes everyone else poor. And the people at fault for the massive and growing percentage of people living below the poverty line are not the ones managing to stay above it, it's the fault of the actually rich, the ones stealing our time and our health and our wages and our future in pursuit of a number on a screen. And the rich are the only people you're helping by hating the people struggling slightly less than you.

When it comes time to 'eat the rich' you're going to be murdering dentists and librarians and scientists while the actually rich point and laugh from a safe distance as you solve their problems for them.