On Liberty, and Memory

Remembrance Day, as it is called in much of the commonwealth, is coming up again, about a month from today. In the US it is called Veterans Day; in France, Armistice Day (Jour de l’Armistice). Officially, it marks the end of World War I, though in modern convention it is a remembrance of life lost in both world wars, as well as to those who died in other military activities, such as the one currently taking place in Afghanistan.

Remembrance has probably been in constant decline since World War II, and that’s unfortunate. I’m talking about real remembrance, not just throwing a plastic flower on our lapels on the way to the mall, an act which for many of us is probably inspired more by habitual adherence to custom, or sub-conscious concern for what others will think, than by a truly conscious act of remembrance.

This Remembrance Day, why not try to remember in a more attentive way? I’m not talking about getting in your car to drive downtown to stand around at the Cenotaph for a few minutes trying to listen to barely audible speeches while shivering. If that’s your bag, go ahead, but if it isn’t your thing, that’s OK. I understand fully. Standing around in a crowd of inattentive, latte-sipping people while parades of tragically militarised children are marched up Cordova Street and warplanes are buzzed overhead isn’t my thing either. I just ask that you replace it with something that is meaningful to you.

It need not involve going downtown, or being an all-day project. In fact, perhaps the best thing you could do is just sit down in your living room, or your yard (perhaps just after 11am, but whenever is good too), and spend a few minutes thinking about war, and peace, and grandparents, and great grandparents and what it was like, regardless of whether they were getting shot at in western France or supporting the effort from home and facing an uncertain and terrifying future. Think about all the legless, armless and headless children of those wars, and of wars occurring right now. Do it alone, or sit with your family or friends and talk about it, or read something. Even if all you do is Google war and spend twenty minutes following and reading Wikipedia links, that’s twenty minutes thoughtfully and productively invested in real remembrance.

One of the more commonly heard expressions about war and remembrance refers to men and women “who gave their lives that freedom might prevail”.¹  Yes, it’s vitally important to take the time to remember those people who gave their own lives, limbs, or health to preserve those freedoms that provide us with all of the privileges that we enjoy today. But simply remembering is not enough. Along with the moral responsibility to remember and honour, there is also a responsibility to continue to preserve and defend those freedoms. Failure to do so, in my opinion, makes all the cenotaphs, wreath-laying, plastic poppies, and war-amps key tags worthless.

When I speak of continuing to defend freedom, I do not refer to the act of sending troops to overseas countries to, ostensibly, fight for the freedom of others and, by extension, all of us. That addresses an area of foreign policy that deserves open and thoughtful debate, but that I am not attempting to address here at this time.

Rather, I refer to the defense of freedom here at home.

It is easy for us to overlook, when it does not affect us personally and directly, the ways that our freedoms – that others died to preserve for us – are being abused and eroded.

In British Columbia, local governments are stomping all over our freedoms with barely a peep of protest from the bulk of citizens. For instance, the Liberal government introduced in the legislature a bill, innocuously titled the Miscellaneous Statutes and Amendment Act, that contains the subsection The Municipalities Enabling and Validating Act. This act will allow municipalities in which olympic events are taking place (Vancouver, Richmond, and Whistler) to enter private property to remove or cover up signs.

Although the act does not specifically mention the olympics or indicate what kind of signs are subject to censorship, it does specify that the municipalities will be granted these powers for a fixed period of time, from February 1, 2010 to March 31, 2010, the period during which the olympics will take place. For more info, see the CBC report, and the text of Bill 13.

The city of Vancouver (led by BC’s own Marshall Pétain, Mayor Gregor Robertson, who speaks publicly about being “pissed” when cyclists hold up traffic but is remarkably quiet about the destruction of liberty) is collaborating by introducing bylaws to complement the provincial act. In addition, bylaws have been prepared that will limit the rights of citizens to carry out certain activities on city streets. Among these are handing out leaflets, holding signs or advertising anything at all that isn’t VANOC approved.

But that’s not all. The Vancouver Police have been hanging out in the downtown eastside of Vancouver, site of Canada’s poorest urban neighbourhood, engaging in a campaign of harassment against the residents of that community. They’re writing jaywalking tickets, filing charges for simple drug possession, and requiring that beat cops stop a minimum of four people per block for “street checks”, which apparently involves identification checks. If you think that’s acceptable, just imagine the same thing happening to you while walking down your own street.

Meanwhile, the special amalgamation of police that is being amassed for the olympics, the Integrated Security Unit, is busy establishing a reputation for being Canada’s ‘light’ version of Stasi. Police are showing up to question people for any kind of olympic criticism. For instance, 73-year old Peter Scott, who wrote a critical letter to the editor, had police come to his door. Or there’s Danika Surm, who had the ISU show up at her class at Langara College, just for being the friend of someone who is an olympics opponent. Just google “olympics 2010 harassment” and you’ll get lots more examples.

The police claim that they are simply trying to uncover any potential threats to the physical security of the olympics – preventing terrorism, in other words. However, I am sceptical. It sounds to me, and to many others, like the police are being used for political purposes. Having “law enforcement” agents visit people who express political opinions is nothing more than an intimidation tactic intended to stifle dissent. It is an unjust, immoral, and completely inapproriate use of state power against citizens that one would expect more from a totalitarian state than one would from good old Canada.

The provincial government has also proposed a law that would empower the Vancouver police to force homeless people into a shelters or other “safe alternatives” during cold or wet conditions. This being Vancouver, cold or wet conditions can be expected at pretty much any time of year, but most especially during the winter olympics.

I doubt that housing minister Rich Coleman has any genuine interest in the safety of the homeless. On the other hand, rounding them all up and stuffing them into makeshift jails will be a highly convenient way of hiding them from the sensitive eyes of olympic tourists. Unless this is just the first step in a more general re-institutionalisation process (following the de-institutionalisation process of the 80s on the alleged grounds of civil liberties) I’m fairly certain that once the five-ring circus has packed up and left town, the homeless will once again be allowed to (or even encouraged to) die quietly in dark corners.

Most of us are not homeless. Most of us have no desire to publicly oppose the olympics. Most of us will not get a ticket for speeding through a red light at Main and Hastings while the police are on the sidewalk reinforcing respect for the rule of law among those poor and weak enough to be bullied.

When the provincial government introduced photo radar, a mass of motorists rose up in protest to defend what they perceived to be an assault on their constitutional rights, such as the right to hurtle through a school zone in two tons of steel with impunity, and photo radar was abandoned.

The fact that a minority does not have sufficient numbers or sufficient resources to rise up against a perceived injustice is not an indication that the injustice is imaginary. We must look out for each other’s rights, even if we don’t always agree with or understand them.

Remember the words of Martin Niemöller:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.

When the winter olympics was first being proposed, I was opposed to it. I didn’t like the effect it would have on the city and I thought it was a massive use of taxpayers dollars being used as a subsidy to corporate interests, little of which would trickle back down to the source. As a return on investment, it seemed unappealling. However, once it became official, I resigned myself to it, and I can say, hoped it would succeed, at least enough so that we wouldn’t get stiffed for another few billion. And I would be cooperating with it today, if it were not for the unprecedented attack on civil liberties that is taking place as a result.

The olympics may be a very desirable event to many, but if we can’t hold an olympics, or any other event, without depriving citizens of their rights to free speech and free assembly, we have no business holding it at all.

Now, I know that in this age of information overload and overwork, it is difficult to pay attention to, let alone be involved in, all of our civic responsibilities. But citizenship and responsibility are work. We owe our forbears the responsibility of carrying out that work. I ask you, not to give all your time to saving the world, but to take just a few moments here and there to do something, anything. To do the right thing. To remember. To remember why.

One great way that you can take some meaningful action, with minimal work or expense, is to join the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association. The BCCLA does an admirable job of defending freedom of speech and the other liberties that we take for granted and advocating on behalf of those who are being deprived of those liberties. You may not – in fact, I guarantee that you will not – agree with all of the people and organisations that the BCCLA defends. You may not agree with any of them at all. But free speech isn’t always pretty or convenient. I might also add that the BCCLA will not spam you endlessly for more money or send you reams of junk mail (I wouldn’t be a member if they did), and you don’t actually have to participate in any of their activities, but you are also more than welcome to do so.

Please, join. It’s easy. It’s cheap. Do it now, not tomorrow. On November 11, be able to say “I remember. I’m doing my part to honour and preserve what they died for”.

If you don’t live in British Columbia, consider joining one of these complementary organisations:

Canadian Civil Liberties Association

American Civil Liberties Union

1. http://legion.ca/About/remembrance_e.cfm [↩]

Not quite Walden Pond

For much of my adult life, I have been living in apartments in what is sometimes referred to as the most densely populated square mile in North America, Vancouver’s West End. I’m somewhat sceptical of this claim, as it sounds a bit like chamber of commerce spin, not to mention that we northern North Americans tend to overlook Mexico as a part of our continent too, surely an area of population concentration of note. Nonetheless, the West End is an area of significant population density.

Density of this sort is an easy thing not to notice when you live in an economically privileged and relatively homogeneous form of it, however. Inside our boxes in the sky it is possible to feel a greater sense of privacy than in a house on a 33 foot lot in the suburbs. Despite having several hundred people within rock-throwing distance, you may never see or hear most of them. Even the other windows of other apartments, and the people behind them, are often distant enough to offer a sense of anonymity.

In my case, I also had the benefit of living right next door to one of Canada’s largest, and possibly wildest, urban parks, Stanley Park. It was like having a 1,000 acre backyard. Yes, I had to share it with others, but some sections, at some times of the day or week, you can have almost to yourself, especially when it’s not summer and the average Vancouverite won’t drag his ass away from the television or out of her car in case it rains. Have they never heard of raincoats?

I love the park, especially when it’s raining. When I lived beside it, I used to put on a raincoat, hiking boots and a Tilley hat, load my backpack with snacks, a thermos of tea, and head out at 7:00am with a pair of binoculars. The trails are beautifully peaceful during a misty rain, the park is loaded with life, and if you sit still for a bit, it will often reveal itself. I once saw a family of river otters cross the trail from the forest into Beaver Lake while I was sitting on my favourite bench.

Another favourite local escape is Wreck Beach, another park on the periphery of the city. Wreck is not the place to go for solitude if it’s sunny and warm, but it is still a great respite, nonetheless. Wreck has different sections, featuring slightly different demographics, though there is a certain amount of blending of and acceptance of “cultures” in all areas. Often on hot summer days I head for the main beach, the only place really suitable for swimming and, conveniently, where there exists an open market for every beach necessity imaginable, including empanadas and magic mushrooms, both of which I highly recommend.

Later in the day, however, I often head to the southern end of the beach, predominantly populated by queer men, where I can enjoy the sunset in relative peace. Sometimes it has the ambiance of an outdoor bathhouse, without the disco, but most of the crowd starts to disperse shortly after 4pm, which means it is pretty calm and quiet until the sun sets, which at this time of year isn’t until after 9pm.

Unfortunately, the presence of an offshore breakwater, behind which sit large booms of logs headed for the mills of the lower Fraser, means that there are only scattered small patches of sand, and swimming is neither practical nor recommended. However, it’s still pretty scenic (in its own, industrially polluted way) and any tugboats working – when the tide is high – are usually distant enough that their engines don’t drown out the buzz, chirp and rustle (and sometimes, moaning) of the plentiful wildlife.

Ever since I was quite young, I have both enjoyed and suffered the incongruity of wanting to be out of the city while wanting to be in it. When I was younger, I was generally satisfied with opportunities to escape the city for a weekend or a longer journey, despite the inconvenience of arranging transport and dealing with the traffic. And then there is always the trauma of having to come back again. This is a trauma I always experience while leaving the park or the beach. As I leave the density and dissolve into the forest, I feel my stress and urban agitation lift from me. The sensation of relaxing is physically tangible in a way that I get from no other experience. All too often, however, as soon as I begin to leave the park to return to “real life”, I start to feel some of that agitation settle once again upon my shoulders, and as I re-immerse myself back into the concrete, car alarms, yapping shih-tzus and gas-powered landscaping tools, I long once again to make a more permanent escape. If it weren’t for Stanley Park and Wreck Beach, I would surely have either fled this city, or fled my (albeit unique variety of) sanity, long ago. They provide me with the easily-accessible respite from urban hubbub that I require.

I’ve had it in my mind for many years that it would make far more sense to spend most of my time living out of the city, visiting it when I am in the mood for a dose, than to be trapped in it most of the time, constantly craving an opportunity to escape. I’ve had many visions of a semi-rural home over the years, and have been scouting out real estate for years. In the late 90s, I contemplated the purchase of a property in the Horsefly area of the Cariboo region in central British Columbia. It was 80 acres, with a small A-frame house, well forested with some cleared areas for growing, and with a large pond in which beavers and muskrats were known to reside. At only $100,000, it was hardly unaffordable.

So why didn’t I buy it? I can list off any number of rationalisations. How will I make money? What will I do for sex? Will I feel socially isolated? Will my nearest neighbours be gun-totin’ Reform Party loonies? Will I miss the city after all?

All valid concerns. Of course, most of those are concerns living in the city too, but there are likely more opportunities to generate cash in the city (regardless of the quality of those opportunities). It all came down to fear of the untested, really. In hindsight, I regret not having acted while I had the chance, and the resources. There would have been challenges, yes. But, older now, and having faced a few self-initiated challenges, I suspect that I would have found a way, and discovered that the differences between “here”and “there” are not as wholly distinct as might be imagined. After all, as I discovered not too long ago, my own big-city Jewish (now former) physician turned out to be a gun-totin’ Reform Party loony.

While I would be inclined now to act, I don’t currently have the resources to follow that path, though it’s not entirely out of the question that it could happen. In order to do it, I’d either have to win a lottery, or re-join the rat race from which I ran screaming several years ago. I don’t buy lottery tickets, and I seem not to have the fortitude (or the masochism) necessary to make the rat race tolerable. So here I am, a city boy still.

In the meantime, I am trying to make things as earthy as possible under the circumstances. I have always had a very polarised view of city living. If I’m going to live in a city, I want to live in the middle of it. If I’m not going to live in a city, I want to be in the woods. I have no time for suburbs, where people seem to resent foliage and physical exertion. Virginia Woolf (apparently) once said “If the choices are Richmond or death, I choose death”. She did, of course, in the end choose death, and I don’t blame her.

I have no plans to solve my residential plight by loading my pockets with stones and taking a nice long swim (though I reserve the right to change my mind if I ever find myself forced through circumstance, or really bad luck, to take up residence on the noxious Mary Hill), but I have taken steps to make city living a little more tolerable and, occasionally, even sorta pleasant.

For the past seven months or so, I have been living in a rented house on the east side of the city. I had always been curious about living on “The Drive” as this neighbourhood is known, but giving up instant access to the park always stopped me from trying it out. As it turns out, I quite like it. It has more real cultural diversity than any other Vancouver neighbourhood, and that’s integrated diversity. Really, the area is probably on the decline, as character goes, since real estate is getting more and more expensive and the people with lots of money and no sense of community buy up land and gentrify things, but for now, I like it.

The food is great around here too. Though many of the historically-present Italians have dispersed to other parts of the city, there are still a number of merchants around that supply their tastes, which conveniently are also my tastes. Old style deli counters at Santa Barbara and Bosa markets are fattening me up on parmesan-crusted salami, prosciutto, fennel sausage, and a variety of cheeses, and the choices of vegetables, with both the Italian and Asian influences, is much more satisfying than those found in the big chain stores.

Another way that I am making the best of things is by having a garden as well, which is kind of like farming on a very small scale. In fact, I have two gardens, having also taken over the unused one at the house next door. The quantity of food that comes out of them is not astounding, particularly since the weather was so unusually hot and dry in the late spring and early summer that many of the more water-demanding greens shot stalks straight up and bolted before they could even produce many leaves. However, I am eating out of the garden daily, mainly lettuce, mustard greens, chard, and snow peas. The pole beans should be ready to eat in another week or two, I have a bit of rhubarb, and I have just done a second planting of a few quicker growing things, as well as some fall crops. If the winter isn’t too cold, I should be able to get a good supply of kale through the end of the year, too. My yard also has apple, pear, plum and fig trees, all of which seem to be producing a good supply of fruit.

Of course, getting food out of the garden is nice, but I suspect a big part of the satisfaction comes from the opportunity to play in the dirt. I can sit out there for hours, digging, pruning, thinning, and weeding. Usually when I am finished, I have half of the garden on me, which I shower off before I return to the yard to sit in the shade and read, or watch the chickadees and bushtits.

As an added bonus to my need to satisfy my farming urges, city council recently passed a motion permitting citizens to keep chickens in backyards, something I have been demanding for years, since it seems absurd that you can have cats, dogs, birds, reptiles, rodents, and even children, but not a couple of hens. The city managers are taking their time actually writing the new law, so I don’t yet know what limit will be in place for the quantity of fowl, but I am making the plans for my new coop in the meantime. Now I just have to start warming my neighbours up to the idea of chicken-sitting for me when I need to escape to the woods for a weekend.

Not quite a car-free city

Last weekend in Vancouver, two events took place that sought to advance the idea of the car-free city. One I attended, the other I tried to avoid, with limited success.

Saturday was the World Naked Bike Ride, an event I favour for several reasons. Any opportunity to run around naked ought to be exploited enthusiastically, but especially when it’s being done to increase public consciousness about, as a friend once put it, the “offensive ubiquity of the horseless carriage”.

That same friend – who recently bought a car to replace his deceased one – had to drag his old bike out of storage and dust it off in order to participate, as it had not been used since the last World Naked Bike Ride. It would be easy for someone less charitable than I (!) to accuse him of hypocrisy, but on the contrary, I think he is being courageous and intelligent enough to recognise that he resents feeling the need to own something that he doesn’t really want, but that the forces of capital conspire to virtually (for lack of realistic alternatives, perceived or otherwise) require him to purchase and maintain. He feels powerless to live without the comfort and convenience of a car, and his participation is an act of symbolic defiance.

The point of the World Naked Bike Ride is not to promote nudity, or cycling, or civil disobedience (though those are all very worthy pursuits), but to remind us that “car culture” is not something that we are necessarily stuck with, that we, as a society, have the power to choose a different kind of city, one in which we are not all subservient to the private automobile and the special interests that have caused us to be enslaved to it. That a large majority are convinced otherwise suggests, in my opinion, lazy thinking rather than conscious commitment.

The other event lends some credence to this view, I think. Car Free Day was spawned on Commercial Drive by people not unlike those who participate in the Naked Bike Ride, citizens on feet and bikes and wheelchairs and crutches and elderly legs who took over the street by force of their collective mass as a reaction to the domination of the automobile. Since those early days, however, it has been largely hijacked by civic politicians and business interests, and become an object of curiousity by those who have either no opinion about car traffic, or one supportive of the status quo.

The result is that Car Free Day is quite the opposite: seemingly large numbers of people drive to a neighbourhood that is holding a Car Free Day event. Sure, six blocks of one street are “car free”, but sixteen blocks in all surrounding directions are jammed with cars whose drivers are either trying to park for the event, or are trying to bypass a formerly accessible artery. It’s not “car free”, it’s “car relocated”.

A major cause for difference between the two events is that the naked bike ride is unsanctioned by city hall (in other words, an “illegal protest”) and is largely unplanned. The route is spontaneously made up by those participating. Meanwhile, the city is involved in planning the so-called car free day, an official series of events that are car-free in name only.

Of course, those who enjoy taking over the street and playing hopscotch where cars normally roam will see it more positively. And good for them. They can enjoy their day of faux-rebellion, and I’ll take my opportunity to flash my scrotum at Floridian tourists. In the end, the cars are still going to get to dominate for the other 364.75 days of the year. It’s that that we need to come together to change.

(Main page photo credit: Hepcat Cabal – http://www.flickr.com/photos/19835686@N00)