$40 Well Spent

This video made my day today, much more than waking up early like a kid on Christmas Day waiting for Santa to have come…hoping that a theme was finally going to be announced, 7 months before the gates open, only to find that it was a “bazaar” one…and Lottery 2.0 with it.

Happiness, and helping the world, doesn’t come from figuring out ingenious new ways to tax people. Masking new taxes and surcharges and “additional fees as applicable” with a hint that “it’s good for the environment”…well, draw your own conclusions, I’m not even going to go there tonight. I’ll let this video speak for itself.

You want to see 3 people with nothing to do with Burning Man on a stage? Then watch a frikking TED talk on YouTube, you don’t need a $30 million a year dance party and 100+ “Regionals” for that. You want to spread a culture of gifting, compassion, and kindness, and environmental responsibility around the world? You could do worse than the sentiment expressed here. Ain’t no BLM “rangers in action” “we’re Earth Guardians” videos making me cry tonight…

From the comments:

“Anyone who saw how the cows ran into the open today would ask themself, where do you even see something like that these days … this joy of life, the spontaneity, the excitement. How could anyone not have seen that”.

$40 is about the cost of a decent steak in a San Francisco restaurant. Support this cause here . I eat a lot of steaks. My girlfriend is a vegetarian, as are many of my beloved friends and family. Some of whom are Burners. How can I live with myself, then? Am I a hypocrite, accusing others of hypocrisy? Whatever, bra. A wise, magical woman told me once: “cows need a lot of land. If we didn’t have a commercial use for them, the land would be used for other things. Therefore, by eating steaks as a species, we’re actually preserving these massive amounts of land for this animal species, which otherwise would get next to nothing”. I know that militant vegans will debate this statement, but that doesn’t make it wrong. What other animal in the Universe gets so much land? Certainly not elephants, tigers, orangutans, or even humans living along the ancient Silk Road between Bodrum to Chengdu…

To me, the happiness of these animals, and preserving habitat for all animals, is a more worthy cause than “commerce and trade on the Silk Road”. Oh, wait: “we’re going to save the roads in the middle of nowhere with a $40 surcharge” #cowavoidslay #cameltoe #savingtheworld

Maybe gleaning an extra $40 from 35,000 people is really going to make a difference in the world, and I’m just being a hater.

P.S. Where do you think those mushrooms you’re chomping down on the Playa come from? The Silk Road? Or the cows? Or both?

P.P.S. From Wikipedia:

Trade on the Silk Road was a significant factor in the development of the civilizations of China, the Indian subcontinent, Persia, Europe and Arabia. It opened long-distance, political and economic interactions between the civilizations.^[5] Though silk was certainly the major trade item from China, many other goods were traded, and various technologies, religions and philosophies, as well as the bubonic plague (the “Black Death“), also traveled along the Silk Routes. In addition to economic trade, the Silk Road served as a ways of cultural trade between the networking civilizations.