Parade Day round up
This past Sunday was Parade Day in the Big Woo, the local St Patrick’s Day parade is as big here as in any city with deep Irish Catholic roots. It’s your standard celebration of nothing in particular with a total disregard for fashion. All in all just another nonevent; here’s my gripe, on Parade Day local law enforcement has a long standing, unwritten policy to ignore all infractions of the law short of thumping old ladies and vomiting on infants. This is all fine by me, one day of the year when people can drink booze outside like big boys and girls and enjoy their city is better than nothing. But why just St Patty’s Day?
This past year, the Worcester Latin Festival requested they be legally allowed to sell beer at their annual event and had to jump through quite a few public opinion hoops, some from within the Latin American community who did not feel the weekend could handle the addition of booze. Well it worked just fine, although if you wanted to drink you had to stay in a cage guarded by the Worcester Police Dept. I understand that with our cities deep puritan roots there’s going to be an aversion to public drinking. It’s obnoxious, but we’ll get over it someday. What I can’t wrap my brain around is ignoring one group’s total disregard for the law (the St Patty’s people) while making it almost impossible for another group to partake in the same sort of enjoyment of ‘their’ festival.
Every summer as we get closer to the Latin Festival the local press covers the planned police presence which is ramped up to curb a seemingly overwhelming sense of lawlessness that pervades the event. Other than a bunch of shitty cars with blown speakers blasting their horns at everything with a pulse at night not much ever seems to go wrong at the festival, especially during the event itself which is always tame in comparison to the St Patrick’s Day parade which rarely clocks an arrest, not for lack of crime but simply lack of enforcement. If you look at the history of the Parade it’s always billed as a family event, but check out Park Avenue after the Parade is through and it resembles the aftermath of a Phish show only with shitty beer. Hundreds of plastic keg cups line the streets, can collectors roam the gutters and shit faced pasty college students stumbling up and down the sidewalks. Clearly laws are being broken, just nobody seems to notice. A family event, right, it’s just like Disney World.
Now if public drinking laws were enforced, attendance to the Parade would likely drop significantly, so turning a blind eye works. And little goes wrong so it not only works, it proves we here in Worcester are capable of having a good time without a massive breakdown in civilization. But the Latin Festival has had a pretty huge, and growing, turnout as well and until last year without booze. So the addition of non-caged drinking would likely only draw more people. To allow one group a sort of unwritten privilege screams racial bias; if the city really believes the Latino community is in fact incapable of acting responsibly with alcohol in public, just say so. It’s not like it would be any worse than allowing the cities Irish to live up to their stereotypes as drunken hooligans (I’m one of ‘em so don’t point fingers). Personally I’d rather drink Mojito’s with a bunch of Brazilian chicks than Bud Light out of plastic cups with a crew of pasty white co-eds, but that’s just me. Ultimately the crime is not being able to acknowledge that when treated like adults people act like adults, maybe not the most responsible adults, but nobody’s getting hurt. And that’s the point of Law Enforcement, not to judge, to protect. So how about it Worcester, lets say we give our buddies from south of the boarder the chance to prove themselves as capable of pulling off an actual party with the same leeway given us Mick’s. If it goes off without incident maybe we can start tappin kegs on the common every Sunday just in time for football season. Tailgating on the common with an LCD projector anyone?
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2 Responses to “Parade Day round up”
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Massachusetts really needs to get over it’s shame of drinking. Yeah sometimes when people drink they do stupid shit, yeah sometimes when people drink people do harm to other people, but that happens everyday, drunk or sober. All over the world alcohol is celebratory. In Massachusetts it just seems to be shameful.
Well put my man