Here’s a thing UD has learned about UD as UD has gotten up there in years.
Time was she loved poignant films featuring tender damaged people brutalized by the world (A Patch of Blue, Forrest Gump); now she has trouble handling the vulnerability/cruelty thing (zillions of films feature this theme), and instead leans toward disaster films where thousands of extras go SPLAT under asteroids.
She seems done, that is, with main characters we deeply glomb onto and watch disintegrate; now she wants a smoking hulk of an earth inhabited by five families who manage to get to the shelter or to Planet New (Greenland, Knowing).
She’s zooming out, in other words, of the whole condition humaine thing…
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And when she reads articles like the one I’ve quoted from in my headline… When she feels the desperate pathos behind names like People Matter Festival…
When she realizes that both the cease fire and the mass education in basic compassion campaign are taking place in Miami-Dade Florida in preparation for Spring Break, she feels that familiar, heavy, useless, unbearable empathy creeping in upon her… An entire American city pleads for a temporary putting down of guns, knowing the gesture is hopeless and that multiple young people will be shot to death during what used to be a fun innocent week… A city government – again, hopelessly – reminds its populace that you really shouldn’t shoot people to death because PEOPLE MATTER…
UD can’t handle how pathetic this is. UD can’t wait til Greenland 2 comes out and she doesn’t have to think about this shit.
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Love the way the reporter describes a barely-underway spring break (March 17 is Day One of the cease fire) as “relatively calm and peaceful.” LOLOL
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UPDATE: Wotta shocker.
You know, there are many things you can do to “close” your city to violent, unmanageable, crowds. You’ll need cooperation from owners of bars and hotels; you’ll need a temporary shift in traffic patterns, coupled with a huge uptick in traffic enforcement. You’ll need a lot of help from police around the state; they’ll have to come in and help you.
You will need to place portable jail cells along beaches and boulevards, so you can immediately arrest high, drunk, armed, dangerous people as they shoot into crowds. Not a very pretty picture; not a very festive picture. But modular cells make sense when lethality overwhelms your city. Remember that when you attract scads of young people, you attract rival drug-selling gangs. These are responsible for some of the killing and much of the menacing/fighting/unrest. If you attract a smaller crowd, you’ll attract fewer gun-bearing drug dealers.
Do not forget social media: Get the message out strongly and early in the game that – as Miami’s mayor keeps saying – your city doesn’t want spring break. It simply endures it.