It doesn’t matter how many bouncey houses and overpriced grease-stands they pack onto RIMAC Field ‘mdash; that doesn’t make getting penned in for five hours of Coheed and Cambria and the ‘Beautiful Girls’ dude any less painful. Especially when washed in memories of the glorious Sun God Festival past, that annual cross-campus Judgment Day on which even the most respectable biology major was reduced to a poster child for complete and total debauchery. When the day stages were nixed and the festivities quarantined to discourage all unregulated pre-RIMAC celebration (seeming to account for the main chunk of arrests and near deaths), it did seem that the heart of Sun God had finally ceased to beat.
The details of this year’s festival are still being kneaded out, but the verdict is clear: We’re sticking to the new format. The infamous Sun God on which we’ve so long thrived ‘mdash; technically the only reason half of us haven’t yet dropped out ‘mdash; has been structurally curbed to officially ruin the one day a year that makes up for all the miserable others.
But things aren’t as bad as they seem. A.S. Associate Vice President of Programming Garrett Berg, though forced to comply with the administration’s updated security regulations and other evils that largely prevent us from holding a soap fight in the Price Center fountain, has expressed his desire for every student at UCSD to wake up and know it’s Sun God. And honestly ‘mdash; paired with newly lifted regulations on re-entry to RIMAC Field, which will allow us to roll in and out as we please ‘mdash; that could solve everything.
Because in the end, the students are the ones responsible for making Sun God awesome. Think about it: The daytime booths, underattended Price Center stage (easily replaced by a boom box) and random student-org activities have always served as placeholders anyway; anyone who lived the festival’s glory days knows that it’s all about slathering on the war paint, breaking out whatever portions of that pirate costume you can find lying around and parading through campus like you own the place. The University Events Office has rented out Sun God lawn to deter any shenanigans, but that didn’t stop the Koala staff from borrowing the water key and setting up their legendary slip ‘n’ slide last year, and it shouldn’t stop the rest of us from getting creative this time around.
All we have to do is remember that what happens at Sun God stays at Sun God, wake up at the crack of dawn for a head-clearing refreshment and do our part in bringing back the glory.