Three blind men approach an elephant. "An elephant is thin and flat," says the first one, feeling an ear. "No, an elephant is long, hard, and pointy," says the second, groping a tusk. "You're both wrong," says the third, plunging his hand into the creature's droppings. "An elephant is soft and mushy!"
This slightly revised parable could be used to describe Occupy Vancouver. Last week, a man went into cardiac arrest after a drug overdose on the Vancouver Art Gallery grounds. Matthew Kagis, a demonstrator and ski patrol volunteer with EMR training, saved the man's life before the first responders arrived. There likely would have been a death without quick attention onsite, yet the local press (aside from a story in the Courier) wasn't interested in this angle on the occupy beast.
A week ago, if you were you to amble past the art gallery grounds along Georgia you might have encountered a few costumed, capering drummers raising a ruckus by the sidewalk, leading you to think of Occupy Vancouver as goofball street theatre. Yet if you ventured in from the inside margin of the grounds, the well-stocked "Peoples' Lovely Library" might convince you the scene is a mobilization of quietly browsing bookworms. If you wandered over to the meditation tent, you might regard the scene as a Buddhist squat.
If you went deeper into the grounds and observed a general assembly or attended one of the teach-ins, you might have seen something light years away from the disruptions highlighted in the local media: a quorum of informed, engaged citizens discussing vitally important social issues in a democratic manner, in solidarity with more than 900 cities around the world.
The "99 per cent" is a big tent, however. People who are homeless, substance abusers or mentally ill have been drawn to the site's security, free food, and the nucleus of a real community. From one angle, this was bad news. From another angle, the tents occupied by the marginal and marginalized are indicative of the very thing Occupy Vancouver is trying to draw attention to-a growing economic and social divide in Canada, where a tiny fraction make out like bandits and the majority get table scraps.
The tragic death of 23-year-old Ashlie Gough turned out to be pre-election ammo for the city's great white hunters, Suzanne Anton and Mayor Gregor Robertson, who fell over each other to get the best shot off at the Vancouver Art Gallery's rogue elephant. The official concerns of civic public health and safety are not trivial, of course. But does the mayor close down SRO hotels in the Downtown Eastside every time there's a drug overdose? The sudden explosion of official concern seems more about keeping the unsightly out of sight, in non-touristed areas where they can quietly expire without fanfare from our visually impaired press.
Speaking of elephants, what about our white ones? The province has spent $563 million on renovations to B.C. Place, yet a 1997 academic study of 46 major league facilities across the United States "found no statistically significant positive correlation between sports facility construction and economic development." In a province with the highest child poverty rate in Canada, in a city with the nation's poorest postal code, that sum is a scandal. The same goes for other multi-million-dollar behemoths like the Vancouver Convention Centre and the farcically financed Olympic Village. Such hyper-expensive civic baubles make the demonstrators' talk of society's "structural violence" sound closer to water cooler conversation than Black Bloc boilerplate.
It's more useful to think of Occupy Vancouver as a global symptom rather than a local blight. Across the western world, two decades worth of debt-fuelled "growth" is dissolving like the Cheshire Cat, leaving behind the grins of banksters-and leaving behind many young people as surplus labour. Hence the sign: "Lost my job, found an occupation."
Without actually conversing with the regulars at the art gallery grounds, it's easy for cynics to frame the scene as a disorganized collection of druggies and thugs, when actually some of our city's best and brightest are still active there. Examining it as a whole, in all its contradictory parts, Occupy Vancouver is the elephant in the living room-both a reminder and a response to a broken system. We can shoo it off or shoot it dead, but the social problems feeding this unpredictable pachyderm aren't going away soon.
