Don't
miss this!
Lee Henderson's
"Fossilosophy"
Kevin
Potvin:
"Liberals' Medicine
a Bitter Pill"
(from The Vancouver
Courier)
Kevin
Potvin:
Downtown Eastside
a Convenient Martyr
From
MSNBC:
Survivalism becomes Mainstream
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From the Editor
East Vancouver as Microcosm...?
I have a vision of Love. And a vision of fear. I live in a uniquely beautiful and complex corner of the world: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Like my home, I am comprised of dichotomies. As an artist and activist, I marvel at the geography, the climate, and most notably this time of year. The fragrance of gardens and wildflowers, the scent of the ocean and even the outlying rain forests permeates the city. Since I’m spending a lot of time on a bicycle these days, and am gaining an acquaintance with the city's bike routes, I am witness to the environment in ways that many urbanites aren't. But as a city-dweller and citizen, I struggle to reconcile the rich beauty, and the mounting horrors of the society around me.
“East Van” harbors a tapestry of people of all shapes and sizes and a huge portion of BCs 'lower class' - welfare recipients, factory working families, social workers and volunteers, single mothers, the poor and elderly. Among shops and restaurants and parkettes, there are also scorned community police stations, set up to address so-called “cesspool” neighborhoods (mine was referred to as such by an officer), there are drop-in centers and soup kitchens, a (stale) sandwich truck that pulls up to Grandview Park once a week, for a line-up that goes around the block. The acclaimed “poorest postal code in Canada” lies a few blocks west of me – a sprawl of vagrants, emaciated men and women ensnared in devastating drug addiction, sex-trade workers, innumerable First Nations people, boarded up storefronts, alcoholics …and just plain poor, working and non-working people.
British Columbia’s government is presently engaged in a sweeping and deleterious budget-balancing campaign. Many of the measures have had educators, students, healthcare workers, and labour, anti-poverty, seniors’ and women’s groups teeming with protest and fearing the unthinkable. Public demonstrations are frequent, and unfortunately, frequently without hope of changing anything.
A dichotomy here is that from both the government's and the affected people's perspective lies the desperate need for radical initiative. Premier Gordon Campbell and virtually every Liberal MLA think they are providing that timely and powerful force of change - called for by unprecedented (and still often clouded) instability occurring across the globe – environmental, social, fiscal, political. Shamefully though, what is occurring is a punishing of the weak …for being weak. For ‘clogging up’ the system with special interests and dependencies. These people who live outside of the power-horse population (which is characterized by large business owners, increasing numbers of right-wing politicians, and prestigious and exclusive communities of mis-educated, under-enlightened over-achievers) know in their bones that the system is saturated with itself, and is about to blow.
After all, in the political world, is anyone really looking at true sustainability, past or present? Obviously not, when you consider how often the issues related to climate change make the headlines these days, and the draining of natural resources and increasing strain on health and education systems to adequately address the root causes of our disintegration. We clearly cannot look to government for the appropriate ‘radical solutions’. Government reforms continually hack through social programs to sustain big business interest and its own over-inflated bureaucracy, and in doing so, perpetuate instability, despondency, environmental health concerns, and general dis-ease – to an ever-widening sector of the so-called ‘civilized’ world.
How much worse can a neighborhood like the Downtown Eastside get before its poisons seep into all of our lives? Perhaps I spoke too soon. We are poisoned already - poisoned to the point of over-permissiveness of greed, lust and class-disparity, deficient in human compassion and true global vision - that we are all blood brothers and sisters. We are ourselves poisoned when our brothers persist in fighting bloodily with one another, enslaved by passion fueled by unimaginable rage; when our sisters, in order to survive, sell their once-sacred bodies to an endless parade of Johns driving shiny SUVs down Cordova Street – both parties having been generationally pushed to obvious insanity. We are ourselves poisoned when our brothers have so lost their sense of the sacred and the beautiful, so as to practically live for their fossil-burning boy-toys, the danger of speed and greed and sex and money and death. And all of this a stone's throw from the unending development of hyper-secure luxury condominium highrises.
This is our modern world. This is our progressive, technological utopia. There is wonder and delight here, but also chaos and peril. Ironically, the downtrodden, the under-privileged, the mentally and emotionally and physically sensitive, the weak, the children, the eccentric - these are the ones who know better than anyone, what struggle is. They can smell it coming. Our body politic is in crisis, and the control center is malfunctioning and cannot be trusted.
When our kin, both the affluent and the emaciated have lost their vision of Love, we absolutely have to start remembering. Ask yourself, “How can I place Love, beauty, and light in my path? To guide me, to empower me, to help me to care again.” Do you remember? Do you remember…? Think about your life, the excesses, the preconceptions, the prejudices, and the lacks. Think about what you can do - there's a world of possibilities. And you are not alone.
I want to recommend some of Cream’s latest columns: Lee Henderson's "Fossilosophy" is one of the most vital ideas I've encountered in a long time, and Tammie Byram Fowles' reflections ring truer than the words themselves. And please keep in touch with Cream and Millennium Art Gallery – we are artist-driven and free-spirited, and there’s no time like the present. Pass it on!
