Reflection on a brief occupation

I visited Occupy Winnipeg today.  With nights already dipping below freezing I had one initial question on my mind.  The answer is yes.  They are preparing for winter.  I only spent about hour at the site chatting with a few individuals.  After biking away, alone now with my impressions, I came to the confession that it is and would be quite easy to mock this local expression.  My conversations were peppered with grasping sentiments about being connected to something larger, vague allusions to support from people with power, comments about getting good press, politically correct placating, bitching against the Man, and some straight-up bullshit.

I would not be surprised if the greatest immediate need this expression fulfills is to have egos rubbed both for people who are valiantly braving the cold in support of justice and also for others who can bring a pot of hot chili and bag of sweaters to feel good about supporting the cause.  Why do I say this?  Do I say this to discredit them or the expression?  I call this a confession simply because it is being honest with my perception and experience. I do not want to create from nothing hopes and notions that do not relate to reality.

And this initial step of confession is important, for myself in any event.  It is important because of the presence of another element I encountered.  What troubled me reflecting on the ‘spirit’ of the people there were the resources  being drawn upon for hope.  One person talked about being connected to something epic another sensed the significance of what was happening, others appealed to the power of vague traditions.  Some dropped ambiguous allusions to the ‘lawyers and doctors’ connected to their cause.  One even said the provincial government ‘supported them’.  In fairness, there was also clear acknowledgement that this is, at the local level, starting from scratch.  They are not even beginning.  They are trying to figure out how to begin.  At this point they are gathering.  And it is a diverse and motivated gathering.  And this I support.

I have struggled with the banner of ‘We are the 99%’.  Perhaps it really is the best possible rallying cry to bring these diverse groups together.  But I struggle with it because of those who do not even factor into the equation.  I am thinking of two experiences I had in the last two days.  One was witnessing a person steal three boxes of diapers (no small accomplishment and no doubt accompanied by no small amount of nerve or desperation).  The other was seeing a neighbourhood kid I have gotten to know riding around on the sidewalk with a bike that had a flat tire and no seat.  Both events stirred that experience of not knowing whether I would laugh or cry if I were to express my emotions.  It is almost comedic in its tragedy and definitely tragic in its comedy.  It is the refuse and rejection of our society.  For me it was encountering the ones that do not have a place holder in the calculation of percentages.  In both instances the people involved were First Nations females.

If there was to be some hope that I took from visiting Occupy Winnipeg it was that there were a number a First Nations women present (a relatively high proportion in a small overall number).  As I stood there not really instigating any conversation one of them simply poured out her life dramatic fashion.  I have experienced enough to call this a dramatic telling not to question whether or not it is factual but to recognize that tragedy  has become one of a limited number of modes of communicating that some people seem capable of engaging in.  But it appears at this site the unrepresented and uncounted are finding some sort of representation.  And that is a good thing.

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A thorough, no, a systematic beating

Heading into Canada Day tomorrow I am about half finished Geoffery York’s The Dispossessed: Life and Death in Native Canada. I have known about this book for probably about 15 years and the cover alone has haunted me for almost that whole time. While I have known about most of the areas covered in Canada’s relationship with the First Nations people what I was not prepared for was to realize the layering and interrelatedness of injustice and abuse this people has faced at the hands of the nation of Canada. At nearly every intersection of contact First Nations were ploughed over.

Take the basic orientation of the relationship.

You are a damned people in need of our salvation.

You are in the way of us establishing ourselves and appropriating these rich and virgin resources.

What did these two motives result in? The attempted reform and actual fracturing of an entire generation in residential schools that wrought profound personal and social devastation. First Nations people are ‘granted’ reservations. I was not aware that many reservations leading up into the 1960s found significant economic models of sustainability (through traditional practices, crime rates were low and substance abuse at a minimum. But then in instances like Manitoba a hydro dam project unfolds in which a reservation receives peanuts for their land and false promises for their future and then their way of life is literally drowned. So in the future band leaders may want to take legal recourse but due to educational, financial, bureaucratic and prejudicial limitations they lack their own resources and cannot afford to hire someone so they are screwed. Some entire reservations were relocated three or four times in the course of a decade due to the government’s growing awareness and desire for particular resources. The shift is always with less opportunities and resources at the next site. And if a reservation is not relocated then mining and extraction companies would descend and kill off traditional sources of food and contaminate water supplies. If an individual or group wants to start a small business they would be unable to mortgage any property (reservation land is not their property) as an operating loan and they must jump through extensive bureaucratic hoops in order to receive funding that should rightly be theirs in the first place. And if they did get permission they often lived in a place with inadequate electricity to power an significant machines. I did not realize the web that this created or more accurately how thorough, how systematic, a beating this group of people has received. And the blows keep coming.

It is hard to imagine this sort of abuse and then we expect them to find their proverbial ‘boot-straps’. Really? Would I want to bend-over in the midst of a dominant culture that has expressed such consistent deception and hatred?

This book was published in 1990 and I do not know how many things have changed at the level of government support and bureaucracy but many of the same stories still surface in the daily newspaper. Insanitary conditions, displacement, land-claim stalling, death by housing fires, suicide, violence and the list goes on. To enter into this situation is at the very least to be overwhelmed as an entire culture has been continually overwhelmed at the hands of a political force that has never made a sustained expression of support and faithfulness to a people.

In as much as anyone wants to ask them to take responsibility for their lives those of us having received the privilege of this land must ask and express what our responsibility is.

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A call for global everything specialists

I hate feeling at the mercy of other specialists.  I am not thinking so much about my occasional visit to the doctor’s office.  I am thinking particularly of the specialists who trade in information about the state of the world, the whole world that is.  How does one become such a specialist?  How does one negotiate the perspectives coming from the humanities, social and natural sciences as well as economics?  All this to say that I have been sitting with an article from last Saturday’s Winnipeg Free Press in the back of my mind for the last couple of days.  It is an op-ed piece entitled “The world is not running out of natural resources” (May 28) by Brian Lee Crowley.  As the title suggests the article outlines the false notion that there is an imminent crisis in global resources.  The main thesis of this position is that most accounts do not take seriously the ongoing capacity for humans to innovate and change course when necessary.  This is the reason why past prophecies of collapse and destruction continue to miss their mark.  This thinking reflects the first half of the article.  I suspect this sort of voice is necessary to counter the type of mindless hysteria that may actually serve advertising firms more than other ‘good’ causes.  But even here I really have no good idea.  I trust soundbites and articles such as these.  It is in the second half that my reservations begin to intensify.

The second half of the article makes a dramatic shift to the economic in stating that since 1800 global economic product has increased 50-fold and “this increase in human wealth has improved the state of humanity throughout the world.”  This is of course patently false as I think it could be argued that it has not improved the state of the First Nations community in Canada (I will not try and speak beyond my borders).  His point however is proved by statistics.  Yes, I suppose statistical improvement is difficult to deny as it has the power to ignore the cost of the marginal who literally do not figure in.  I am reminded of Kierkegaard’s thoughts on statistics near the end of Stages on Life’s Way,

With the help of statistical tables one can laugh at all of life. . . . After all, a person can shut his door on the poor, and if someone should starve to death, then he can just look at a collection of statistical tables, see how many die every year of hunger – and he is comforted.

Sorry.  Off track.  As Crowley begins to conclude things really come off the rails in my mind.  Crowley holds wealthy nations as the beacon of what direction the world should be moving in.  “The richer countries become, the cleaner their environment.  So economic growth is the key factor allowing us to reduce most of the problems facing humanity. . . . [T]he right human institutions, such as private property, the rule of law, contract, incentives and human intelligence all work together reliably to solve those problems.”  Is it just me or should it be hard to make such statements (at least without some gag-reflex kicking in).  I have no doubt that I would be quickly silenced under the statistical ‘facts’ that Crowley would load on me if I tried to refute this thinking.  And again, I have little hard evidence with which to enter this conversation.  However, take the statement of correlation between wealth and environmental cleanliness.  Is this not simply a matter of a nation’s ability to bring in and then off-load undesirable content and processes such as manufacturing, recycling and disposing of the junk wealthier nations desire for temporary pleasure?  Can Crowley continue to say these things under the tenuous economic conditions that still (seem to) exist in the US?  Is it possible to speak of an ‘improved state of humanity throughout the world’ by statistics?  Seriously, I am no expert.  Does it even make sense to enter this argument using the same methodology?  I mean Crowley moves from the natural sciences to economics to existential well-being without any necessary transition, they are all seamless in his conception.  Is this just the worst of ‘ivory tower’ thinking that does not live alongside those whose lives have gone from manageable to chaotic while some larger global trend tracks in a rising graph according to a ‘human well-being index’?  Again, I don’t know.  Any global everything specialists out there that can help me?

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