Hope and Festivals

[talon]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/09/us-japan-restraint-idUSTRE7381HE20110409

I understand the sentiments about the disaster, but I don't see how excessive self-restraint helps matters.

I totally agree. Austerity and self-restraint are not necessarily the right attitudes in the wake of a disaster. The normal rituals and celebrations of life should continue. They would perhaps be much more subdued, but they should not be cancelled.

Nor should simpler pleasures such as music concerts and sporting events.

All work and no play makes for a dull day. And a dull, disheartened people. Drudgery, especially overwhelming drudgery, needs the light-hearted and the fantastical to make the work more palatable.

I don't understand deprivation and self-restraint when it causes, to my mind, more harm than help - especially if that deprivation and restraint and austerity is imposed from the outside by those who are not themselves practicing even greater austerity, self-restraint, and deprivation.

Funding celebrations and entertainments after a disaster helps keep the morale and spirit up and may be the difference between severe clinical depression and the expected sadness and depression of surviving a major disaster.

Where are the encouraging songs, the dedication to the future, the connection of past and future in present acts, the hopeful optimism, the confidence that normalcy will return?

When austerity and deprivation are imposed in order to lash people into recovering faster, it back-fires. People begin to resent the lack of hope, the suppression of pleasure, the constant dreary labor.

The Cherry Blossom Festival should have been a bigger deal this year than ever, for all the hope and beauty it symbolizes.

I am sad that the Japanese government canceled the festival and thrilled that the Japanese still chose to celebrate it anyway.