The whole situation, obviously, but also (and more particularly) this gentleman. I just feel like as a society, as a planet, we can step up our game.
I do not believe that William should be imprisoned for his choices, as we live in a free society; I simply believe we should take this opportunity to reconsider our values as a community and do better.
Tags: news i guess, william who said he is a wizard saunters across a meadow
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Huh, OG Juggalos.
From descriptions both of Rainbow Gatherings and Gatherings of Juggalos that I’ve read about in the past, I honestly think I’d prefer the Juggalos.
Okay, I give up. What in the legitimate hell is he carrying over his shoulder?
Pretty sure whatever else it’s symbolic function, it also serves as a pipe.
With the luck the local Lakota are having, I’d bet it’s some kind of magical witch broom, with which he’s going to jump off of a very high tree while believing he can fly.
Either a garden rake with a bunch of streamers tied to it, or some offensive parody of a coup stick?
It looks like a ribbon-dancer and a rake had a baby, and that baby grew up to be hideous and useless, like Chuck Johnson.
I think it’s to distract other wizards’ cat familiars.
My sister lived in Heber City when they were there last year, and she complained about them the whole time. She’s normally more the type to live and let live and doesn’t care if people are merely weird, but she said they had no apparent respect for others at all. Stole stuff from stores, some incident she told me about involving someone heavily intoxicated trying to break into her neighbor’s house, left trash and feces everywhere, all-around grossitude.
So I’m sure they’ll be super respectful of the Lakotas’ homeland and traditions.
Their time in Heber cost the city over $100K, (in police overtime, repairs, etc) Which a small town like Heber can ill-afford. The news was all about the crazy things they were doing, eating produce IN the supermarket, trying to sell drugs to children (unsuccessfully, since the seller was pretty high at the time).
Communing with nature sure is expensive for the people that pay to live around it.
I have attended a few National Rainbow events, and I WAS in Heber City for a week camping with the Rainbow. I AGREE with you, MANY MANY MANY “rainbow” people at the small Wal-mart hassled folks, screamed at me for not giving them a ride up to the trail head.
What disgusted me more was the open forum attendance at this event. I was one of the youngest (25) and only among about 30 other folks. That’s a pretty sad number to discuss tradition, alternative ideas, and all around Rainbow News, for a gathering that supposedly generates more than 10,000 folks. I am disgusted at the “festie” folk who not only think this is a ruse to take drugs and be okay, but have lost complete respect for themselves, and the organization itsself. I pass the torch. I love you. I will not be in attendance to another Rainbow Gathering unless it is over seas.
The one person I know who goes to this is an utterly irredeemable assbag, so in my mind the entire event is full of people just like him. I suspect I am not far off the mark. vomits
I can ditto the irredeemable assbag anecdata.
ohhhhhhh my god i did not know about this
Me neither! Yikes! At least during Shambala, (massive rave party in Salmo, BC) people are (mostly) respectful to local townsfolk and don’t pretend to be anything else but stoners (not that there’s anything wrong with that, #PrimoKootsHoots).
How are we not done with hippies yet? HOW.
To be clear, I am not wishing harm/death on my fellow living creatures. I do wish that they would collectively rise from their futons one morning, take a long look in the mirror, and say, “Today. Today is the day I stop being SUCH an asshole.”
“And maybe I’ll buy a real bed while I’m at it”.
(Futons suck).
Futons: neither a real couch nor a real bed.Two-way uselessness.
i just moved to a new place but as i am only here for a few months am sleeping on a futon… it’s been a week and i regret my choice already.
My first TWO boyfriends had futons and they were both colossal prats who basically disappeared up their own arseholes, so even if the futon was proven to be the most spinally amazing bed in the world, I would still hate it as an aggressive symbol of my own bad choices.
I’m pretty sure most of the hippies pictured in the article are boomers, so even if they finally gave up on the hippie asshole-ness they’d probably just move on to general boomer asshole-ness.
(Disclaimer: Some boomers are very nice people. I’m sure all the boomers reading this are lovely. It’s just that as a group, you’ve kind of fucked up the planet and the economy, and you seem to be ignoring the first problem and blaming younger people for the second, and these things get pretty tiresome for the rest of us.)
While also claiming yourselves the generation that ~changed the world~. Like, yeah you did. For the WORSE.
(Note that a lot of the truly rad civil rights / women’s lib stuff was accomplished by folks of RBG’s generation.)
don’t apologize, Boomers are the enemies of all humankind
No, middlemarch is right, they did do some good stuff in their youth. They’ve only been really awful for the past thirty years or so.
It’s just hard to remember that because that’s basically my whole life.
Oh! I mean, they barely did much good even before the 80’s. Mostly they just supported some solid policies created by people born in the 20’s and 30’s.
Then they realized that building a fair and just society is hard and quick profits are fun, so they loosed Reagan and Bush II onto the world.
Oh, that makes sense. History is hard. Thank you for the correction/clarification.
Boomers will be remembered primarily for having pulled the ladder up behind them.
I like to think of them as a colorful counterpoint to all the fucking fundamentalists I have to deal with on a regular basis. They’re both insufferable groups but at least with one group some laughter will eventually result.
Yikes – people have already started showing up?
There are not enough U’s, G’s, and H’s in the known universe.
Lord Byron is hogging them. Asshole.
They need to save these hijinks for Burning Man.
I used to see them in Nevada City, for some reason they are drawn to old mining towns. They offered to sell me peyote and to read my aura
LOL I grew up in Grass Valley and…. yup. So many hippie loons. I probably still have a crystal somewhere from crystal wizard guy at Summer Nights.
OMG, I grew up in Nevada City/Grass Valley too, and yes. The crystal wizard guy at Summer Nights. I had completely forgotten!
They need to save these hijinks for Burning Man.
noooooooooes!!! we’ve got QUITE a large enough hippy problem already, thankyouverymuch.
“In 2014, the Rainbow Family Gathering was held in Heber City, Utah, where, following a stabbing, a death and a drug overdose, authorities said at the time their biggest concern was ‘drugs and violence.'”
Peace and love, man.
I was part of a reconciliation event yesterday, where one of the teachings shared from the Anishnabek perspective is that settlers arrived ‘having forgotten how to be a real people”.
See illustration above.
I don’t know, he looks like a wizard to me.
Too bad he left New York.
but where is his hat that says WIZZARD so that we can all be sure
he’s got a beard and some kind of staff there, what else do you need?
But does his staff have a knob at the end?
Yes of course.
A wizard’s knob.
I hear a wizard’s knob is a pretty powerful ingredient in a witch’s brew.
This reminds me of WILD, when Cheryl Strayed and that little crowd of hippies miss out on meeting up with the Rainbow Gathering. I was reading the book on the train and said, out loud, “Ohhhh, bullet dodged, people!”
Dude. Dude. My mom worked the front desk at the Forest Service near there. After previous bad experiences* with the Rainbow Gathering she sent everyone who came and asked where it was to one of about twelve different places. When I read that section of WILD I was like “Mom! My mom deceived those hippies! Hi mom!”
*The Rainbow Gathering destroyed some mountain meadows because <sigh> because they don’t have an established authority, so they don’t take out permits because someone has to sign that permit and also the required number of portapotties can only be required if you’re a permitee so they FILLED A PRISTINE MEADOW WITH SHIT, and also pulled out the waddles in the creek that kept it from downcutting and dewatering the meadow – they broke a meadow. It breaks my heart.
This is for your mom:
My mom is objectively the best.
That meadow story is sickening. HERO MOM, WE SALUTE YOU.
If it makes you feel any better, consider that the above photo is from July 2001, so William could be long dead by now.
Possibly in some kind of tripping-over-a-rake incident…
Oh, also the Rainbow Family — those guys are pretty notorious for leaving a serious mess behind after their gathering, but I don’t know, maybe they are getting better at it.
Nope. They were near-ish to me last year and left $100ks of damage behind, in a rural town without loads of resources.
No. My aunt works for the forest service and the stories she tells about the cleanup they had to do after a gathering on her forest a few years back…yeah.
Noooooooo white people whyyyyyyy
My mother-in-law is an intimidating lady; engineering career, mother of objectively the best person in the world, moved to a new country and learned a second language as an adult, doting wife, affectionate aunt, gourmet chef, snappy dresser, poised, clean house… anyway, I fucking hate her, that’s healthy.
I didn’t yell at her when she tried to break us up by sending him to his home country for four months, I didn’t yell at her when she stopped paying for his college and refused to fill out the FAFSA, I didn’t yell at her when she said marrying her son would be bad for both of us, I didn’t yell at her when she tried to change our wedding ceremony on three days notice. I hide my hate fairly well.
But when she said “Oh, one of my friend’s sons is going to an event that you’d like! It’s in a meadow, and it’s communal, and…”
“YOU THINK I’M A FUCKING RAINBOW PERSON? YOU DISGUST ME.”
I don’t know if you’ve commented about her elsewhere on the Toast, but I would love to read more about her and your relationship with her – I can see EXACTLY why you feel the way you do about her.
Also: your response was 100% justified.
I always want to gossip about her!
I feel like I avoid the most obviously difficult part of having a paragon as your spouse’s parent, because my spouse is 100% invested in having a partner who likes to talk about feelings and cuddle and share cool internet stuff instead of a tiny dynamo of accomplishment.
But I am all in about my career/passion, so it always shocks me that my in-laws know nothing about what I do. I’m not exactly quiet about it usually, but somehow it has never ever come up in a conversation with them. It’s been over a decade.
And they are expats – I chalked a lot of the stuff from the first few years up to cultural differences, but then when I went home with them the extended family was like “they are insane. they do not think of other people. they work too hard and think everyone else should too. have more wine.”
I have a difficult relationship with my MIL too. Everyone is like “she is such a nice lady” and I am like, “yeah, and you’ve never been on the receiving end of her constant passive aggressive rebukes and fundamentalist bullshit. Or the same treatment from her daughters and their husbands.”
She’s never tried to break up my relationship with my husband but has made it clear that I really wasn’t what she expected as a daughter in law. I guess they’re not what I expected for in-laws either. It just leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.
Glad the extended family has your back.
That sounds really hard. I wish the extended family had your back too.
I am in Virginia right now, wishing a bit that I was back in Vermont where it isn’t ridiculously warm. Then this reminded me that my current state of residence is crawling with hippies. Nope. Think I’ll stay in Williamsburg a bit longer.
It seems like the Juggalos at least have fewer stabbings.
Can we have more things with the “william who said he is a wizard saunters across a meadow” tag, please?
This post has inspired a new high re: the comment section. I’m LOVING IT!
“high”
snigger
I was going to compare them to LARPers, but then I realized that’s unfair: LARPers have more sense of decency than to hold events in other people’s sacred spaces. Also, they usually clean up after themselves.
Former LARPer, can confirm. I used to LARP at a community college. Events were organized weeks in advance, everyone had to sign in, and clean up was an integral part of the evening. If you didn’t help clean up, the nerd in charge would hunt you down at the TGIFridays across the street and humiliate you.
And LARPer’s take the wizard robe off once they’re done role-playing. They don’t legitimately think they’re real wizards -cough- William -cough-.
Hippies spend their entire life role-playing and don’t seem to understand that a 40 year acid trip doesn’t mean you’re ultra-spiritual, you’ve just destroyed your brain chemistry.
God help me, I need sleep.
I tried to parse the caption.
Did William merely state once that he is a wizard or does he lay claim to wizardliness on the regular?
Will we ever know; would we ever care?
We have a chap at work whose gait is the exact same as the pip-boy “haters gonna hate” gif and he serves as my current mental picture of “sauntering”. He looks a little like William. I guess I’ll allow that he and his outsized dreamcatching rake thingamagubbins (is it a nightmare-spreader? can we call it that?) could be out for a saunter.
But yes, this is me slithering under the level of the bar at which Mallory determined that we could do better.
I have failed, spectacularly.
having met dudes such as this dude, my money is on “wizardliness on the regular”. always. as a profession.
These are the best comments I have ever read in my life. That is all. Please carry on.
Rainbow Gatherings and also Hare Krishnas are both filed in my brain under “Things that really appealed to me at 19 but then turned out to be horrible.” I am continually disappointed by reality.
I’d love to know more about your experience of Hare Krishnas. When I was 19 (snap!) my best friend became a devotee. It was horrible and I hated it at the temple and it made me irrationally want to cry. In fact I think I grabbed my shoes and fled the temple at one time, running down the street in my socks. They freaked me out, those creepy Hare Krishnas.
Even the Rides Needed Board…. I really can’t, family: http://aspx.starsrainbowrideboard.org/Rides.aspx
Thanks for the link. Is there a word for words that look the same? Visuanym?
I will defiantly be leaving by the 1st – probably sooner tho so if you need a ride and are between boulder and home feel free to call
Defiantly leaving! Don’t try to stop me! I’m going! Take that!
Oh, god where do I start? My ex, who was from a very traditional, very Shintoist Japanese family convinced me to take him to one of those Rainbow Family/ New Age type conventions. It was highly amusing to see him take down a very ernest white woman who explained ” Tibetan Singing Bowls ” to him. He struck it with the pestle, and said ” It’s a bell. My mother uses one in our family shrine.”
Wow, so much hatred for hippies.. Yeah it sucks that there’s violent people at this festival, but the worst that colourful hobbit man looks like he can do is give you a scathing look for mispronouncing Mithrandir.
Seriously though I’m from Australia and have been to some truly wonderful fun colourful hippy festivals, why the hippy hatred?
Well, reading over the comments here it sounds like they’re bad neighbors, environmentally destructive, and shit everywhere. And on top of that, the linked article is about how this year they’re gonna be getting their copious drug use and minimal sanitation on in an indigenous people’s holy place, which in their privileged ignorance they will probably claim to venerate even as they literally and metaphorically shit all over it.
There’s a certain amount of #NotAllHippies to be had here – like, these are obviously worse-than-usual examples of the type, but the line between “I’m a free spirit who doesn’t do what society tells me!” and “I’m an asshole who doesn’t think about how my behavior affects others!” is one that needs close watching.
This all sounds pretty bigotted to me. This isn’t a case of #NotAllMen because there aren’t statistics that prove every third non-hippy has been assaulted by a hippy in their lifetime, nor are hippies a generally unpersecuted majority. Just replace your broad brush “smelly, unemployed, ‘dont you hate that cultural stereotype'” rhetoric with a racial group of your choice and see how it makes you sound. I’m not saying there aren’t valid issues in that article, but a) event organisers are responsible for making sure an event is set up properly for waste management and b) festivals everywhere have problems with rubbish and drugs and violence
I don’t know. There seem to be actual facts behind the disapproval voiced by the commenters here, witnessed personally or by people close to them (so, not coming from dubious sources). Plus I assume Mallory wouldn’t post something like this if she didn’t already know something about how this group typically behaves.
Also, a group of mostly white (?) people choosing to hold a festival on a native people’s sacred grounds pings the disrespectfulness radar for me, or at the very least the “willful ignorance” radar. So that doesn’t bode well either, although of course it is not a statistic.
Um, hopefully someone else has more knowledge about this than me and will chime in with something more useful.
Okay, I flubbed up by writing that first paragraph as if it were about Universal Hippie Truths when I was thinking specifically about this Rainbow Family group. The distinction did not make it from my head to the actual comment; I should have specified, I did not, mea culpa.
But serious side-eye to that “if you said this about a race of people, it’d be racist!” line of argument you’re putting forward. It is not possible to be racist against hippies, hippie identity is not foisted on people by society or biology, please do not continue with that nonsense.
You’re right, using race as an example was reductionist but bigotry is bigotry and it is certainly not specific to race and gender things that people have no control over – if I say that a specific religion or nerds or ‘the poor’ are a waste of space and i hate them it’s still bigotry.
Yes I get that it’s a culturally insensitive festival, but just because D12 are misogynist that doesn’t mean all rap is bad.
Obviously not everyone agrees with the hippy values of environmentalism, human rights, spiritualism, life-is-not-work, drugs-are-not-bad, play is for adults too – whether or not it’s carried across the entire group. I was just surprised by what was very similar really to conservative hate speech about liberals.
This isn’t bigotry or remotely similar to hate speech; both of those terms have very specific definitions which do not apply to a bunch of privileged white people doing crystal meth and shitting all over the woods. I myself am an *extremely* liberal privileged white person, have regularly attended a huge hippie music festival here in the States (that is held in a public area with all permits applied for and approved, with the majority of attendees abiding by public sanitation, leash laws, pet care) and had a great time hanging out with people of all stripes, and I think the Rainbow Family pretty much sucks. They are anthitetical to everything they claim to espouse. In particular, they suck because:
1) they totally refuse to abide by actual environmental credos like “pack it in, pack it out” and do significant environmental damage to the areas where they gather by
a) abandoning animals (over 100 dogs left behind in Washington)
b) starting wildfires with discarded cigarettes/joints (*multiple* wildfires in Wyoming)
c) cutting down trees, going off trail into protected animal sanctuaries
d) creating other serious public health hazards (seriously, there is no way leaving a meadow covered in human and animal shit and destroyed qualifies as “environmentalism” – that is the exact opposite of what true environmentalists who care about nature or ~Nature~ would do)
2) they clearly have no respect for the sacrosanct status of native lands and historical cultural artifacts on those lands despite claiming their origin was foretold in Native American legend; they continue to perform sweat lodge ceremonies after having been asked repeatedly not to by Native tribes (pretty much the opposite of the whole “spirituality” thing – respect for spirituality goes both ways, and the RF demonstrates none)
3) they are known for pretty much raiding food banks (which have very very very small coffers intended for local families who can’t feed themselves, not for wandering hippies) and openly steal food from grocery stores, gas stations, etc.
4) they cost public services (medical care, law enforcement, state/federal land management/care) catastrophic amounts of money and make no effort to repay (given that it seems extremely unlikely that anybody attending RF gatherings also pays taxes)
5) rape/sexual assault/harassment of women and girls, abuse of individuals with intellectual disabilities/other psychological disorders, etc., are continuing problems.
I found empirical and anecdotal support for all of these complaints (and more) in about five minutes worth of googling. In short, the RF is not a festive, spiritual gathering of hippies getting in touch with each other and the land: it’s a bunch of assholes fucking up everything they claim to cherish – they’re pretty much everything they claim to hate in capitalism and the outside world (what they call “Babylon”). Cultural insensitivity is just the tip of the total asshole iceberg.
WILL NO ONE RID ME OF THIS TURBULENT WIZARD
Because they’re AWFUL.
-They’re holding this gathering (which is notorious for leaving behind a trail of filth and petty thievery from the community) on sacred ground.
-They’ll spend ALL GD DAY preaching the “love and peace and live and let live” gospel but they can’t be assed to take personal responsibility for things like personal hygeine or parking their car correctly or getting their dog neutered or not holding a motherfucking drum circle in the yard next door on a Tuesday.
This is maybe/maybe not relevant to this conversation but I recognized this person in the photo and can tell you that he was (at the time, again this photo is from 2001) both mentally ill and homeless. Which, I don’t know, makes me feel personally bad to see him being so mocked. I mean, wizards and hippies: ugh, right? I get it. But I don’t know, I guess I just feel like saying William had a back story.
<wince>
Oh yes the fact that Rainbow people are individuals with complicated histories.
I hope that William is currently both alive and doing well.