Where You Are

So to understand this post, you might have to understand three things about me.

The first is that homes to me are neither transactional or transitional — which explains why I split my time  between one home that's been in my family for 50 years and one that I bought as a HUD home and have slowly fixed up. I see my role as caretaker to these places in their history, rather than temporary placeholders. It's a different view than many, I know.

The second is that I have relatively little tolerance for those who feel like anything bad comes from where they live (unless you live in a nuclear test zone or something). Because it turns out when you decide to move simply because that act alone magically make things be "better," that your problems somehow follow you.

The third is that I am unapologetically in love with my state, and with Saint Paul in particular. Despite statements 1 and 2 above, I've lived all over the world (though for shorter stints, and long ago), and I really do think it's amazing here. And I try to serve to make it better.

So, to the story:

Over the weekend there was a big EDM festival here, which was for some reason next to and not within a fairly new stadium. Social media (particularly after Day 2 of the event, which seemed a little louder) was full of dissenting opinions about it. Predictably, they ran the spectrum  from "Get off my yard!" to "You hate fun!"

But it's in the middle that I think we need to grow.

There were people who were generally ok with the event during the day, but thought it was too loud by late (it went until 11). Though the time was within the permitting variance (which does that late on Fri/Sat), they probably were above the decibel level, though that's hard to prove. The posts generally were not angry at the festival, but thought there should be a better regulation/notification system. I agree, and think that proper notification on especially new events helps a lot.

There were another batch of people who thought the event seemed fun and "made it seem like we were in a city." In general I get their point as well — I've been spending a lot of time encouraging people to go out lately. I would bet my stepson was at that festival, and that it was a blast. What I was not impressed by was the general way that those posts vilified people who were had complaints, insinuating that they were terrible people because they had issues. There was a lot of name-calling, and exhortations to "just move out into the country then."

It seemed like the first group was looking for ways to make the system better, using the festival as an example — and the second group was yearning for something that *might* not really exist (I can't imagine a similar festival being in held in a residential area when I lived in  Boston, or London, when I lived there, without similar comments. Maybe Taipei, which at that point really had no regulations).

So my point is that if we want more vibrancy, we need both. The people who want more notification and some better controls are right — and sometimes events thrive better with tighter controls. The people who want more fun events have a point as well; though I'll cynically note that the Hmong Freedom Festival, also held this weekend, probably had a bigger economic effect on the community, and I certainly know a lot more people that attended that than who attended Breakaway.

So how do we get both and encourage people to listen to each other?