It's All Performance Art 102

Here I am, four days away from my flight to Colombia and I still don't feel quite ready, but this too shall pass.  Right now, our official Canadian propaganda organ, the CBC is waxing all smarmy and nauseating about the tenth anniversary of the Winter Olympics that were held here in this city ten years ago.  Of course, they are going to give scant or no attention to the Olympics resistance network, which I was part of, demonstrating, marching and resisting on opening night, this corporate incursion that did only more to trample on the poorest of the poor in my city and to help make Vancouver unliveable to all but the super wealthy.

I remember, still, like it happened yesterday, the huge several thousand strong march downtown, with singing as well as we showed the city and the world that not everyone had swallowed the Olympic Kool Aid, and that there were at least a few people who believe that giving adequate support to the poor and upholding human rights is more important than adulating a bunch of young competitive jocks.  I was also on the front lines, confronting police on horseback near the entrance to the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Olympic games here.  It was a bit scary, and fortunately none of the less than stable hotheads among us could successfully provoke the police into charging into us on their steeds.

Still, the legacy of the Olympic games has simply been to turn Vancouver into a city of broken dreams.  Now everyone who is wealthy wants to live here, and this has made even a modest apartment unaffordable to a lot of folks who have lived in Vancouver all their lives.  This is pure economic and social injustice.

Leaving is often an uneven process.  There are still some situations I wish were only a bit better before I am gone.  I have one friendship in suspension and there are people in my church I am legitimately annoyed with, but perhaps being away for two months will give us all a therapeutic rest, and we will be able to see things with more perspective.  Time will tell.  It's hard to say.  I am also moving into the new.  A new friendship in Colombia and possibly even more new and undiscovered friends both there and in Costa Rica.

I am always glad to leave behind me for a while every year the Canadian reality.  We really do not have much of a profile internationally and if I want news of my homeland when I'm away, then I usually have to go to CBC online.  Otherwise, we and our many small little parochial Canadian problems don't really have existence elsewhere.  This is equally humbling, annoying, and gratifying.  Humbling because we are not the great white north eagle scouts we like to believe ourselves to be.  annoying because it's a bit of a blow to the ego.  And gratifying because we really don't have to live up to any high-falutin world class status.

All for now, darlings!