This is an open letter to the Happy Family attending the Glastonbury Music Festival the other week—the one whose glacial speed nearly made me miss getting to the front in time to see Kate Nash throw up; hopefully, you will read it before we attend any more festivals together. I’m sure you know who you are: the family of five who were moving at a snail’s pace in a crowd of approximately fifteen thousand people, all the while holding hands in a long, drawn out snake; the family that was acting like you were playing “Red Rover” with the crowd; the family that got offended whenever someone tried to cut through your daisy chain of happy family-ness.
Yeah, you. So tell me: what’s up with that? Were you under the impression that you were the Von Trapp family and the Nazis were just behind you? Did you believe that the only way to make it over the Alps/through the crowds without leaving someone behind was to cling to each other for all you were worth? Or maybe it wasn’t anything so interesting as all that: maybe one of you dropped a contact lens, and the rest of you decided to do one last sweep for it—together, of course, because that’s what Happy Families do.
Anyway, my point is this: we get that you are a Happy Family. We get that you are all together (how could we not, with your matching t-shirts and equally matching sunburns?). But do you think that maybe, just maybe, you could save your show of familial solidarity until after the big crowd?
Don’t get me wrong: I like happy families. Really. Occasionally, I’m even a member of one of them myself. So, yeah: I understand. After all, I have kids, too—kids who, for the most part, I don’t want to lose in a crowd either (well, not the boy). But, even so, I have somehow managed to bring my children to the far reaches of the world—and back—without once having to resort to forming a human scythe to do it.
I know, Happy Family, that you may be reading this and saying Well, so what? What difference does it make to you how we choose to keep our family together in a crowd? Here’s the thing: when you do things like play “crack the whip” with an unwilling crowd, or ram into people’s ankles with your Ford Explorer of a stroller, or, worst of all, deposit your “bum bombs” in any place other than a trash can, it does make a difference to me, because you are making things harder for the rest of us who are trying to take our families to non-standard family events. Trust me: when we show up at something like a music festival we already get the eye rolls and the “well, there goes my good time” looks—we don’t need your help. We don’t need for you to have made a pass through the crowd before us, sweeping away all good will in your wake. We can establish enmity all on our own.
And, the thing is, like I mentioned before, I understand why you do the things you do. I understand how tiresome it can be to have to endure the nasty looks every time you walk into a restaurant that isn’t decorated in primary colors, and I understand how that frustration can lead to the belief that in return for raising the next generation of nurses, and soldiers, and video game designers, you deserve to take a few liberties with other peoples’ ankles and time.
And, you know, you may have a point. But, next time, it’d be nice if you could make your point someplace where getting to the next stage doesn’t matter quite so much. Or at least someplace where Kate Nash is going to be sober.