The theme for this year’s Minneapolis May Day parade was water. For those of you not familiar with the parade, it’s street theater at its best. During the cold winter months, artists from the Heart-of-the Beast Puppet Theater and volunteers make costumes and floats for this annual event. This photo essay documents parts of the parade.
As the program for the event notes, water is essential for all life, not just fishes and other creatures that live in the water.
When we forget the water,
We forget the child who
Begins in the water.
When we forget the child,
We forget ourselves,
And then
We forget the world.
Florence Dacey (1981)
Clean water is plentiful for Minnesotans, but that’s not true for the rest of the world. The clowns in the parade demonstrated that we can be wasteful and showed us the need to conserve.
The average American uses 70 gallons of water daily while Europeans use between 24 and 36 gallons. A human needs 2.4 gallons of clean water per day for basic needs.
The next part of the parade depicted an ad campaign for the fictional bottled water company called H2NO. People feel a need for purchasing bottled water despite the fact that Minneapolis has clean, healthy tap water readily available. Not only is the water expensive, but the discarded plastic bottles present a problem for our landfills.
As the program for the parade pointed out,
Coca Cola developed a strategy to maximize profits for both its customer Olive Garden restaurant chain and its own Dasani brand: to train restaurant employees to encourage customers to buy bottled beverage rather than request free tap water. What did they call the plan? H2NO (NY Times, "Just say no to H2O unless it’s Cokes own brew," Sept. 2, 2001).
Bottled water is a $400 billion dollar a year industry, and the main ingredient in two popular brands, Aquafina and Dasani, is tap water (Corporate Accountability).
Although some kids were afraid of the wolf
They should really be afraid of the monsters that locked water in a giant tower defended against thirsty people by monsters and armed guards.
Scary indeed as the hat depicting the coffin of Victor Hugo Daza shows.
According to the Wikipedia,
Víctor Hugo Daza was a 17-year old Bolivian citizen killed by the military during the protests of early 2000 in the city of Cochabamba. People in Cochabamba protested against the privatization of local water supplies by the Bechtel Corporation that forced the poor to pay as much as 25% of their incomes for water.
Fortune Magazine predicts that water in the 21st century will be the commodity that determines the wealth of nations as oil was in the 20th century. The authors of the parade program warn us that it is possible that the peace of this century will be waged by the way that we share and protect the water.
Happy May Day! Happy Spring!
Most of this diary was paraphrased from the program for the parade. The photographs are mine.