The Fetishization of Collective Trauma
Vancouver is about to witness another "healing festival." The Lapu Lapu event, framed as a response to last year’s tragedy, is being sold as a necessary communal balm. It isn't. It is an exercise in performative resilience that prioritizes optics over actual recovery.
We have entered an era where tragedy is the ultimate content engine. When a community suffers, the immediate reflex isn't quiet, sustained support for the victims. It is the organization of a high-visibility event. We’ve commodified "healing" into a series of food stalls, stage performances, and press releases.
If you want to help a grieving community, you provide long-term mental health resources. You provide direct financial aid to the families affected. You do the boring, invisible work that doesn't make for a good Instagram story. You don't throw a party and call it therapy.
The Myth of Closure via Celebration
The competitor narrative suggests that by gathering to celebrate culture, the community "reclaims the narrative." This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how psychological recovery works.
Psychiatrists like Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, have spent decades explaining that trauma is stored in the nervous system. It is deeply personal. It is messy. It does not operate on a one-year anniversary schedule.
Forcing a festive atmosphere onto a timeline of grief is a form of toxic positivity. It tells those who are still struggling—those for whom the "healing" hasn't even begun—that they are late to the party. It creates a social pressure to "move on" because the community has officially checked the box of a commemorative event.
Civic Absolution Through Festivals
City officials love these events. Why? Because a festival is a visible, low-cost way to signal empathy without addressing systemic failures.
Whenever a tragedy occurs in an urban space, there are usually underlying issues: lack of security, failed social safety nets, or infrastructure gaps. Addressing those costs millions and takes years of political will. Approving a permit for a Lapu Lapu festival costs nothing and provides a photo op of leaders looking somber yet "inspired."
It is civic absolution. By funding the "healing," the city effectively closes the book on the "failure."
I have watched local governments pull this move for twenty years. They trade genuine policy change for cultural spectacles. We are being distracted by the music while the cracks in our social foundation remain unpatched.
The Logistics of Displacement
Let’s look at the "People Also Ask" logic: "Is a festival the best way to honor the victims?"
The answer is a hard no.
A festival, by its nature, centers the attendee, not the victim. It centers the person eating the street food and watching the dance. It transforms a site of mourning into a site of consumption.
Imagine a scenario where we took the $100,000 or $500,000 spent on stage rentals, security, permits, and marketing for a single weekend and put it into a perpetual scholarship fund for the children of those affected. Or a permanent, quiet memorial space that invites reflection rather than noise.
The festival approach is ephemeral. It’s a sugar high of communal belonging that leaves the most vulnerable members of the community feeling more isolated once the tents are packed up and the streets are cleaned.
Cultural Identity as a Shield
There is a specific brand of shield used here: the celebration of Filipino heritage. By tying the healing process to the Lapu Lapu festival, any criticism of the event's timing or efficacy is framed as an attack on the culture itself.
This is a cynical maneuver.
Lapu Lapu is a figure of resistance and strength. To use his name to mask the discomfort of a community’s ongoing pain is a disservice to the history he represents. Resilience isn't just about showing up to a park; it's about the internal fortitude to face reality without the bells and whistles.
We need to stop using cultural pride as a band-aid for structural trauma.
The Downside of My Argument
The counter-argument is obvious: "People need to be together. Isolation kills."
Yes, community is vital. But "community" is not a ticketed event with a sponsor wall. Real community happens in the living rooms of the grieving, in the community centers on a Tuesday night in November when nobody is looking, and in the mutual aid networks that operate without a PR firm.
The downside of my stance is that it is un-fun. It demands more of us than just buying a taco and listening to a band. It demands that we sit with the silence of the tragedy.
Stop Performing Recovery
If you are going to the Lapu Lapu festival to "heal," ask yourself whose healing you are actually facilitating.
Are you there for the victims? Or are you there to feel better about the fact that you live in a city where such things happen?
True recovery is quiet. It is slow. It is unmarketable.
If the goal is truly to honor those lost, we should be demanding better safety, more direct support, and a city that doesn't treat a one-year anniversary like a relaunch of a brand.
Stop asking when the next festival is. Start asking where the money went.
