Religion

Every year our town throws a festival. We call it spring fling and it lasts all weekend. It started out small. Some of us local restaurant and bar owners got together and sold some food and beer on the street. We had local musicians perform and local artists display their works. The first few years were great. Now things have gotten out of hand. The city has been in charge of this things for 10 years now, and every year the price for a permit has gone up. This year the festival is bigger than it has ever been. But the sense of community is gone. There aren't any local restaurants, bars, musicians, or artists anywhere to be seen. They have been priced out of the market they created. My family and I still went. We had $5 lemonades, $4 corndogs, and $3 ears of corn. None of which was local and none of whose revenues are staying in the city when the festival ends. Of course the city is profiting from the permit fees, but I don't see how that benefits our citizens. As I was walking down the streets I was reminded of a cartoon I saw while in college. The cartoon was several hundred years old, from about the time of the american revolution. I was writing a paper on william pitt and was looking through some very old publications when I came across this cartoon.
In the center of the cartoon was a man descending a mountain with a stone tablet. The stone tablet read "God's steps to eternal Happiness" or something to that effect. On an adjacent mountain stood the devil and one of his demons looking at the man whom god had just given the keys to happiness. The demon said "that looks like trouble, what are we going to do now?". The devil responded "this is great, I can't wait to institutionalize it".
That's what has happened to my festival, they've institutionalized it. Same with my cancer treatment. Leave it to humans to have a good thing and mess it up with taxes, rules and stipulation.