This past Sunday I went to the annual Calle Ocho Festival in Miami. It wasn’t quite like any festival I had been to. Walking up and down 8th Street that day I had a lot of thoughts going through my mind.
Like how packed it was and how difficult it was to walk anywhere or enjoy anything. And how unorganized and half-assed the entire set-up was almost as if the entire thing was an afterthought. As if they were just doing it because, hey, thats what we’ve been doing every year… it’s tradition! You could see it in the eyes of the visitors; they were all detached. But there they were, to say to their buddies that they were there. Calle Ocho has become a social trophy. Except it’s a dime a dozen.
Like how so many young girls were scantily-clad that they all started to look exactly the same. And so many shady looking old men and thug-wannabe young men were hitting on them. Same old, same old. Yet the same girls turn around and complain about respect. They crave attention but not the kind of attention they are getting. They know they’re asking for it, but they continue under the banner of “FuG aLl ThE hAtErZ (Yes, with a ‘z’. A capital one)!” But the haters never mattered because they are actually screwing themselves over.
Like how miserable many of the immigrant food vendors look taking orders grumpily in Spanish and shoveling food into plates. They hate being out here, you can see it. But they have to suck it up because they don’t know what else to do. Even though they know that doing the same thing over and over will yield the same results. Life in America has been hard for them, but perhaps they have been even harder on themselves.
All I could think about at Calle Ocho was this: when did people stop thinking? When did they stop realizing that Calle Ocho (or anything else in life) has no meaning unless you give meaning to it? Why are so many people so mindlessly here? When did young girls and people in general stop thinking for themselves and starting doing the opposite of what they want or what they desire? When did the food vendors give up at life – was the burden of responsibility too heavy, too limiting, too intimidating?
Why does this entire thing feel so mechanical, so meaningless, so dead? I feel like I am in a bad dream.
Slowly, I began to see similar parallels in my life. I have also felt limited, stifled, and hopeless. I had spent too much time living in the past, fearing the future, and ignoring the present. How were these people any different than I? How could I blame them?
Because it isn’t about other people. It isn’t about Calle Ocho and it isn’t about tradition. It isn’t about attention and responsibility and approval. We really just don’t want to face ourselves. So we shoot ourselves with stimuli – any external stimuli. Just like how a heroin addict keeps shooting up to avoid his demons.
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