"Cause trumps reality."

Last weekend I went to the Global Citizens Earth Day Concert on the National Mall. The concert was an event meant to spread awareness, to it's viewers, about climate change and global poverty. The event included many speakers such as actor Don Cheadle, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Besides the notable speakers, the performances consisted of bands My Morning Jacket, Train, Fall Out Boy, No Doubt, and singers Mary J. Blige, and Usher. The event started at noon on Saturday, but lines were formed to enter the show at two in the morning. I got to the concert around nine and found a good spot in front of the stage where I, and 270,000 of my closest friends, stood under the harsh sun for eight hours. We listened as foreign ministers on environment, from different countries, came up and said what we can all do about climate change. In between speakers we watched many multimedia visual pieces, about different artist's visual interpretation of the problem that is climate change. At the end of the long day, viewers and I went home, leaving the National Mall a pigsty. 
      
The next morning, after the concert, the headlines of newspapers in DC did not read "Global Citizens Earth Day Concert sets a blazing trail for ending climate change," or "Big name performers make way for erasing our carbon footprint," but instead they read "National Mall Trashed After Global Citizen 2015 Earth Day Concert." The concert was for a good cause and there was a lot of information given by speakers who took part in the event, but the event was more talking rather than doing. Concert goers had little regard for Mother Earth as they left the Mall, leaving their plastic, non-biodegradable bottles, and non-recyclable Styrofoam food containers, on the grass and overflowing every existing trash can. The concert was powered by solar energy, but the rest of the event was mostly talk.
    
The reason I am writing about this in my blog, is because we will be talking about Media in our last seminar this semester and what it does for disasters. I am not saying that the concert on the mall was not a well intentioned or even badly executed event, but I am a little pessimistic about how much it did for the cause and how it is different than what has already been done. 

Works Cited
http://legalinsurrection.com/2015/04/crowd-trashes-national-mall-for-earth-day/http://legalinsurrection.com/2015/04/crowd-trashes-national-mall-for-earth-day/
http://dcist.com/2015/04/global_citizen_2015_earth_day_wrapu.php#photo-1
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/christinerousselle/2015/04/19/national-mall-trashed-after-global-citizen-2015-earth-day-concert-n1987325