I sure hope Orange Crush doesn’t have the same problems it had last year. I’ll reduce those problems essentially to two:
- Incredibly irresponsible behavior by the party’s organizers who made no provision and the attendees who devoted not energy for cleaning up the beach at Tybee.
- Irresponsible behavior of a different sort the following day by online commenters who viewed the behavior as incredibly exceptional. The suggestion was that somehow the gathering of young black adults defiled the beach in ways that it has never been.
I should have taken photos of Forsyth Park in the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Daniels show last spring or the more recent of Montreal concert. Of the two, the Charlie Daniels show seemed by far the worst — the park was disgustingly filthy.
Yes, we have in our heads an image of pristine beaches, but I think we all know that Tybee near the pier is hardly pristine, and it’s hard by any logical measure to see how trash left on the ground above the high tide line is dramatically different than trash left in Forsyth or left on Savannah streets to wash into storm sewers on St. Patrick’s Day.
Big gatherings of Americans in public places have one pretty predictable result: mounds of trash.
So let’s hope that some young people at Orange Crush today take the lead in helping keep the beach clean.Â
And let’s hope that Tybee officials are better prepared than last year. They certainly seem to be.
It certainly looks like those two hopes will be tested. The weather is beautiful, and a Twitter search for “orange crush” is finding new tweets about every eight seconds right now.
For a lot more about last year’s Orange Crush and the controversies it spawned, check out my post from last year: The many lessons of Orange Crush 2K12, which includes the morning after video of trash on the beach that fueled the controversy.
The comments are especially interesting.