Isla Vista is home to a few truly notorious events; one of these infamous weekends goes by the name of Deltopia.
This town surrounding UC Santa Barbara, which has been named one of the biggest party schools in the nation by multiple online publications, hosts wild parties every single weekend. So this leads us to ask the question: Do the residents of Isla Vista really need a reason to party any harder than they usually do?
The answer is no.
The community of Isla Vista should come together to effectively kill Deltopia, or at least what has become of it.
Over recent years the hype around this particular event has been upsold to the point where there are now ads warning people about the dangers of Deltopia airing on the popular music streaming app, Pandora. These ads tell cautionary tales, attempting to ward off potential out-of-towners from visiting, by stressing that there will be serious consequences for coming into town and interrupting the peace.
If anyone who actually lives in the town of Isla Vista thought about it, they probably wouldn’t remember the last time they invited someone to this notorious party.
Somehow there ends up being six people they haven’t heard from since high school graduation crashing on the floor, but no one seems to recall asking them to come be a part of our community for a couple nights of binge drinking and bad decisions.
Isla Vista residents do not want out-of-towners infiltrating our tiny one square mile town and ruining it with vomit and litter. Don’t they know that their garbage goes straight into the ocean they end up drunkenly skinny-dipping in at 3 a.m.?
The people living here benefit in no way from Deltopia weekend. What used to be an enjoyable local tradition blew up into a massive riot in 2014, and there is no upperclassman who will soon forget what that looked like.
People took tear gas cans to the face, were shot by rubber bullets and ended up having to stampede away from hundreds of police officers trying to tame the riotous crowds.
This is not a tradition that anyone who truly appreciates the spirit of Isla Vista would ever want to be a part of.
In 2015, the year after the riots, there were over 300 police officers patrolling within the city in order to try and deter people trying to make the same mistakes they did the year before.
The task of keeping these rowdy out-of-towners from swarming our community should fall onto the shoulders of those of us that live here.
There is no reason why history should repeat itself. No one wants to see those creepy 1984-esque cameras back out on the corners of Del Playa.
This can all be prevented if as a community, Isla Vista residents allow the now ruined Deltopia to dwindle into obscurity and move on to better, less destructive things.
