Today’s Times-Picayune reports that the Mid-City bonfire has been cancelled this year. As I wrote last year, everything good about the event died when the city got involved, but if we need further evidence of that, consider the reason it’s shut down this year. It wasn’t budget cuts; it was an unwillingness of anyone to step up and take responsibility for it:
Although [a non-profit group] raised $10,000 to pay for permits and insurance, [Mary] Hogan said the problem has been finding a group or person who would be responsible for the event, essentially assuming the liability if something went wrong.
[The story continues]
Last year, a small nonprofit organization agreed to sign on as the event’s fiscal agent to complete the paperwork. That hasn’t happened this year.
“It is an event that happened spontaneously,” Hogan said. “Who is going to personally step up and say, ‘Yes, I will put my name on an insurance policy as legally responsible?’”
Hogan said people interested in keeping the bonfire tradition going might need to form a new nonprofit group or other organization that can assume the permitting and insurance responsibilities each year.
Last year, the bonfire became about fear – the damage it might do that it had never done before – and about property and the need to control it. Now at stake is the other great American obsession – liability and lawsuit anxiety. Can this whole sad charade stop before it reveals even more pathetic and venal things about our character?
