"Why not be a nice boy, and just keep quiet, when you know that people will get upset if you don't?" Hmmmm ... where our subculture stands today.

Such a fuss some people will make over the strangest of things, when they have so many better things to do. We travel to an arts festival through some of the most beautiful scenery a visitor could ask for. Do our companions focus on these fleeing images, so easily lose in a moment of inattention, never to be found again? Some have the sense to do so, but others want to shriek about the fact that ... oh, it doesn't really matter. They'll always find an excuse, and more importantly for their purposes, they'll find people who'll make excuses for their irascibility. "Can't you just let it drop", somebody will be told, whose only offense is to be the one screamed at instead of the one doing the screaming. But to accept an appeasement ethic is to place control over the floor of discussion to those either least able or least willing to control themselves, and the impact this will have on the tone of discussion can't possibly be a good one.

The ironic result of seeking peace at any price in discussions is that the possibility of real peace will recede ever further in the distance as the group consensus grows ever more irrational and outright hateful, taking on the aggessive nature of those who've been allowed to define it. The craziness actually reinforces itself after a point because were common sense allowed a chance to return to the discussion, many would end up feeling more than a little bit embarassed. Much like the drunk who gets ever more drunk to cope with effects of his drinking, our groupthinkers are pushed in the direction of their own pathology by the need to cope with its effects. To appease such a cut-rate mob is about as considerate as handing a bottle of whiskey to a skid row bum. He'll love you for doing so, but shame on you if that makes you love yourself. By giving him all that he asked for, you would impoverish yourself, only making your beneficiary's trip back to peace and sanity more difficult in the process. The same pinciple applies here, believe it or not. Let me give you an example of just how bad the craziness has become in some parts of the Burning Man subculture. The impoverishment we see when we appease one of these is one, not of money, but of things that matter far more - of our minds and spirits.

On a list which will remain nameless here, somebody sent a letter to the list entitled "why fine wines cost so much", showing a beautiful model stomping the grapes. It was kind of cute but a number of people flipped out. Some complained about the size of the letter, which came in at about one Meg. Fair enough. Notice that we don't allow attachments. But the attacks were out of all proportion to the offense, which was really nothing more than an oversight. What was ludicrous, though, was hearing from people who were "offended" because ... ready for this? They were offended because the model was too attractive.

Oh, for G-d's sake!

I've met one of the louder complainers in person. He's a nice guy and I don't mean this in a disrespectful way, but he needs to lighten up, especially on this. If you're going to Burning Man and related events without a sense of humor, you've kind of missed the point and the sad thing is that some of the organizers are starting to do that. If nothing else, I think that one of the great contributions that the more conservative burners have to make is to be that voice that occasionally says "give me a break" and brings people back to reality when they start to take absurd complaints far too seriously.

Without somebody to do that, the humor will start to lose its edge because something that really is funny always does walk on the edge of the unacceptable. If we're too afraid to take risks because of who might feel offended for no sensible reason, then the mirth will die. All that will remain will be an attempt to be a little cruder than the person who came before in the hope of milking a little more shock laughter out of an increasingly jaded crowd. Such an approach offers one nothing more than the inevitability of ever diminishing returns. In the end, going down this road, Burning Man will die because it will become as stale and drained of imagination as so much of Stand-up has already become. People will just be tired of it.

And you know what? That would be a darned shame, because whatever the antics of some of the more difficult people online might be, there's something here worth saving. That idea of dissolving the proverbial fourth wall between the performer and the audience and creating an experience that people live instead of just watching. The very notion that you will drop by and not know what will happen next, aside from knowing that you'll be a part of it and you'll probably be glad that you are. At the very least, being so won't give you serious cause for regret.

When somebody says "it's just a (expletitive deleted) camping trip", he's wrong. Burning Man at its best is a needed reminder of what we've lost in a corporate dominated America. Spontaneity. Community. A real sense of connection with people who will make a reasonable effort to take you as you are, instead of conditioning a show of friendship on your willingness to be just like them. In a word, Freedom.

Look back to your childhood. Try to remember, really hard, and think about the adults who were around you and how they lived. When did we forget that freedom, real freedom, was supposed to be something we saw a bit of, 52 weeks per year? Maybe not as intensely as we sometimes see it on the Playa, but enough that an average week gave one the opportunity to go make a few memories and a few stories if one wished. Fast forward to the early 21st century. Now, what do you see? A world in which spontaneous human interaction in our "public places" has been legislated out of existence in the name of crowd control. One where, as we meet each other in the private places that remain, there are so many arbitrary rules in place that one can scarcely breathe, much less be oneself.

The point of the Playa experience is that the Playa is neither city space nor really private space. At least, it hasn't been up until now. If you want to roll out your carpet in the middle of the desert, no cop is going to drop by and threaten to arrest you for "loitering". If others are curious and sit with you, Nevada's finest will not be out in force with nightsticks drawn to disperse the crowd. People are free to gather as they please with no more structure imposed on them than those structures they desire, because they're out in the middle of nowhere and a sizable community is out there with them. That, far more than the nudity and certainly far more than the drugs, is what has made events like this a liberating experience.

What we have been offered, however briefly, is the freedom that was once the birthright of an adult in concentrated form - more intense than before, but also more brief. That week is ours and we do well to make it count, because in the overstructured, socially engineered world of our era with those wonderous 60-80 hour work weeks (poverty being the only alternative offered) freedom is not what we're going back home to. The very thought that it might be, no longer even occurs to us.

In light of this, in a life in which one does practically nothing but work and get told "here is where you go, here is what you do", how mind boggling that somebody would have the nerve to try to take away those last scraps of freedom and turn that last patch of desert dust into a place where some bureaucracy tells you what you can do and what you can say, with no more justification needed than to say "because somebody might make a scene otherwise" or simply "because we say so". At what point do you tell somebody where to go?

When you get to the point at which in the planning for that one lousy week, you dare not speak your mind because somebody might be "offended", a few choice bits of profanity should be sitting on your lips fighting to leap forth. Compromise on your freedom of expression, your freedom to be yourself? Buddy, you've been compromising on that for 51 (expletitive deleted) weeks and through G-d knows how many years of "paying your dues". How much of a compromise is enough? At what point do you say "no more"? After how long do you say "I've given up this much freedom and the rest is mine to keep"? To give up that last scrap without a fight is to forget what it is to be human. No wonder BMOrg is so drug-friendly. An anesthetized crowd raises less of a fuss when it gets robbed.

"Aren't you the one who's ranting, now?", some might ask. No, and the answer to that one goes back to Burke, at the very least - the concept of the social contract. Onesided civility triumphing over hatred might make for a nice fantasy and a halfway decent five hour Ben Kingsley movie, but real life doesn't work that way. On a gut level, people respond to strength and an apologetic response to an unwarranted attack (from somebody whose conscience won't bother him) just looks weak. The PCer's unprovoked rant is an emotional assult, an attempt to establish dominance on a psychological level just as hitting somebody is an attempt to do so on a physical level. In either case, you'd better stand up for yourself and respond in kind if you don't want to be ground into the dirt. Nature gave us the ability to get angry BACK for a reason - that anger is the source of our strength, what makes us wolves instead of sheep.

Yes, we might agree that the other has a right to be dealt with courteously, but like many social rights, this one is defined in terms of the social contract as it must be : those who fail to hold up their end of the bargain forfeit their rights under it through nonperformance, just as with any other contract. Were rights to be viewed in any other way, they would effectively become the sole possession of those disregarding the social rules which gave rise to them, creating a perverse incentive which would destroy the very social order which we would find ourselves called on to sacrifice our own personal dignity to maintain. Surely there is little sense to be found in discarding a thing of value in exchange for payment which one knows one will not receive; the bargain which a rational society must choose is a clear one, and it is not a call for unconditional, onesided civility. Righteous anger in the individual should not be mistaken for aggression because the effect of making the equating of the two a normative social outlook would be to bring society to the point of making that fool's bargain we allude to above.

"What you just wrote doesn't sound very Conservative, or very Libertarian either", others will say - and be dead wrong. It is a myth that Conservatives are mindless defenders of the status quo, and even more of a myth that Libertarians are, one that comes of equating "doing something about a problem" with "having some central authority take care of it for us". To a liberal's comment that the government should be given more power in light of the many bad things that the fortune 500 bring into the lives of some many, one nonliberal response might be this : "If concentrating some much economic power in so few hands produces bad results, what makes you think that concentrating more power in an even more centralized entity is going to be an improvement?" An alternative solution that some would suggest is that if one is concerned that the concentration of economic power in a few hands is dangerous, that one might consider making a conscious effort to buy from smaller companies and persuade others to do likewise - consciousness raising instead of coercion. If a company treats its employees or customers poorly, the answer is to get the bad word out, and refuse to do business with them, taking your business to somebody who's earned a better reputation, or maybe even start your own outfit and earn a good reputation of your own. In a sense, faced with irresponsible moderation elsewhere, that's what we're doing here - taking a little initiative of our own, decentralizing the discussion forums a little by creating a few not under BMORG control, and giving competition a chance to work its magic, seeking a higher standard of justice through a sort of market discipline.

"OK, fine then, this doesn't sound like much fun", some might say. "You sound so angry". Sure, sometimes I am angry and occasionally maybe you should be angry, too. But if so, that doesn't mean that one needs to be angry all of the time, just that one should remember to be when it comes time to assert one's legitimate rights. For G-d's sake, if you can't be left alone enough to be yourself when you're 40 miles from the nearest road, where can you be? Mars? At some point, one has to turn to authority and yell at the top of one's lungs "back off"; whether authority is a corporation or a government agency is immaterial.

Once you've done that and made the point stick, then you can have fun and it'll be the real thing. If at times we seem a little grumpy and our refusal to cave in inspires others to make a scene, keep in mind that we don't do so because we love being grumpy or enjoy watching others throw tantrums. We do so because we know that in life, pleasures have to be worked for and maybe deferred a little until we've earned them through our efforts. We do so because it's 2002, not 1982, and we've learned from painful experience that no matter how far we run to get away from our politically correct and socially challenged friends, they will follow us. To enjoy our freedom anywhere, we must take a stand somewhere. The question always is, if so, why not here? Why not now?

You might be surprised at how quickly and how completely bullies will crumble in the face of real opposition, and what else does one call those who try to win arguments by silencing their opposition? We open this list today to see if there is a real opposition left to be found in the Burning Man subculture. If it is, wonderful, and we offer our piddling little group as a supportive meeting place for it to gather in, what we hope will become one among many. If it isn't, then so be it, and no great and irreparable loss. Places like the Playa existed long before Larry Harvey ever thought of going out there. If need be, what was created once can be created anew, and honestly people - don't we owe it to ourselves?

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