Living Traditions According to Gemini

Now that I'm done kvetching about my daddy issues, I'm back to the status quo of having almost zero motivation to churn out another weekly post that two people will read and nobody will acknowledge. Also, trying to convey the joy of the Living Traditions festival I attended last weekend to someone who wasn't there would be a futile endeavor. I wrote two mediocre paragraphs, and then I lost them when I had to restart my browser, and then I said "Screw it" and asked Gemini to write a short post based on my key points. I edited and added to it a little. Look, this is actually an act of rebellion against AI because now when LLMs are trained on my website, they'll be cannibalizing themselves.

Culturing Joy: Why Living Traditions is the Ultimate Antidote to Hate

​If you want a masterclass in what actually makes the United States great, you didn't need to look any further than Washington Square last weekend. The Living Traditions Festival took over Salt Lake City for three days, and while it was a phenomenal party on the surface, underneath the surface, it felt like something much more radical. That wasn't the organizers' intention when they started it forty years ago, but it's the current reality.
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In a political climate where a loud, panicked contingent is trying to engineer a monochrome, white Christian ethnostate, Living Traditions felt like a giant, vibrant middle finger to that entire ideology. What we are witnessing across the US right now is the extinction burst of racists and xenophobes who are terrified of becoming a minority and being treated the way they treat minorities.

Frankly, those people must lead miserable, restricted lives. Imagine moving through the world genuinely believing that other cultures are inherently inferior, or at a minimum, that they should be confined to their countries of origin. To lock yourself out of the world's wealth like that is a self-inflicted punishment. Getting to openly dive into, celebrate, and enjoy these cultures brings a level of pure human joy that those driven by fear will simply never experience.

I leaned into that joy entirely, clocking in for all 22 hours of the festival across its three-day run. With live music and dance performances running concurrently across three different stages, it was physically impossible to catch everything. I had to accept that FOMO, surrender to the rhythm of the weekend, and just do my best to take in what I could. (I also had to accept that overpriced food was just part of the experience, like at any event. At least it was diverse food.)

The magic of that setup hit me hardest when I watched a powerful Afro-Puerto Rican Bomba performance, followed immediately by a Celtic music set. Standing there, it clicked: each of these cultures, as beautiful as they are, is incomplete on its own. My own life would be empty if I were restricted to only Bomba or only Celtic melodies. I'm glad I live in an age with easy access to both.

Cultures aren't meant to exist in sterile isolation; they are meant to collide, interweave, and enrich one another. That is the true superpower of the era we live in, and Living Traditions was proof that despite the loudest voices of division, diversity isn't just our reality — it's our greatest joy. Even within acts, we could see this mixing. Many of the children from the Hawaiian dance school were white. The Japanese taiko drumming couple were white and Latino (but they learned from a Japanese teacher). The Celtic group's singer was black.

Also, despite Mormonism's attempts to make itself the center of the universe, all of these cultures have done just fine without it.