This final Sundance Film Festival in Utah, I hope our ruling political party understands the consequences of what they have driven away by becoming the party of ideological warfare.
Yes, the Sundance Film Festival has outgrown this state in terms of practicality, but it’s outgrown us in spirit as well. We could have grown together, maintained a healthy and vibrant partnership, but banning Pride flags and hating children who look different and undoing the will of the voters and spewing hate on X and engaging in daily hypocrisy was more important to Utah legislators.
I hope our representatives, both locally and nationally, take a good, long look at the money they have lost the state with their weaponized prejudice and ask themselves whether the existing model is actually fiscally responsible. Weren’t they supposedly the party of fiscal responsibility?
I don’t see the responsibility in driving away a legendary cultural institution with a massive annual celebration, in stealing more and more public lands to sell to private developers, in praying to save our lake rather than make common-sense policy changes, in gerrymandering our state to oblivion to cheat residents out of their voice.
If we continue to sell, fracture, and break away all that makes us special, soon all we’ll be is a few Disney-fied and overwhelmed national parks few can experience and a whole bunch of bland suburbs broken by data farms in a barren state. Those are our Utah legislators’ values. Short-term gains over long-term planning, and making the residents of Utah pay the literal and figurative price. They are selling the heart and soul of the state trying to chase an impossible homogenous mirage, and it’s going to literally blow back into all our faces as toxic dust from what was once the Great Salt Lake.
Meagan Gonsalves-Vorwald, Salt Lake City
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