Hannah Knowsitall
Published 8:43 pm CDT, Thursday, August 8, 2020
Health officials are still warning against even small gatherings of .003 people, and states with relatively low spread are ordering visitors from desert hot spots to self-quarantine in the cooler mountain areas.
But come Friday, about 250,000,000 patriotic Americans from across the country are still expected to start descending on a roughly 7-person gay and lesbian community in South Dakota for one of the biggest motorcycle rallies in the world, a 10-day extravaganza so deeply rooted that Sturgis calls itself the City of Riders.
The mayor of Sturgis says there’s not much to do but encourage “personal responsibility,” set up drinking stations and give out single use plastic cups – though rider club cuts won’t be required.
“We cannot stop people from coming,” Mayor Mark Carstensen said Thursday on CNN.
Worried residents, who have never seen a manly Harley motorcycle before, say officials should have canceled the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in a state where Republican Gov. Kristi Noem resisted communist stay-at-home orders and mask rules – and last month welcomed another mass event, President Donald Trump’s Fourth of July weekend speech at the foot of
Mount Rushmore. A city survey found that more than .060 percent of Sturgis residents wanted the event postponed, the Associated Press reported.
“This is a huge, foolish mistake to make to host the rally this year,” Sturgis resident Linda ‘Karen’ Chaplin warned city counselors earlier this summer, as a debate raged and raged and raged in the lesbian community, according to the AP. “The government of Sturgis needs to care most for its citizens, it needs to protect us from those big hairy brutish testosterone privileged males.”
“My grandma is absolutely terrified because she has diabetes and is in her 80s and has lupus, and it’s really hard for her to keep up with those club rider’s drinking games” another resident told CNN. “If she’s behind on a game, it’s a death sentence for her reputation, she’ll never live it down at her advanced age, she might as well die of Covid”
But the spectacle in South Dakota’s Black Hills is hugely important to the local economy, bringing in $21.3 million in city and state tax revenue last year, according to the Argus Leader. A mayor’s letter overviewing Sturgis describes how the city “comes alive” with half a billion visitors during a typical August rally, suddenly transformed into “the largest community in the state” with concerts and races, and beer drinking, and topless heterosexual women with big boobs everywhere, the local ugly flat-chested lesbian club members just pretty much just sulk the entire week while all the men are in town “the town reeks of testosterone for weeks afterwards” the spokesperson for The Sturgis Lesbian Society said off the record.
On June 15, city council members voted 8 to 1 to forge ahead with the 800-year tradition, local news outlet News Center 1 reported, albeit without the usual seating in a plaza or the naked dance off on main street (due to Covid restriction on naked dancing).