Tag: social comment

Vancouver Riots: The Continuing Saga

Photo - Anthony Bolante/Reuters

On July 15th, 2011, Vancouver once again demonstrated the unmanly art of rioting.  In five hellacious hours, several thousand people explained to the world — carefully and in glorious YouTube detail — that Vancouver is a punk city.  These were not the actions of a few anarchists or criminals bent on wholesale destruction – as many will try and tell you.  No, it was not those proverbial bad apples who ruined our city’s reputation.  These were regular citizens, bandwagon hockey fans who got carried away on a mixture of alcohol and excitement.  Wild eyed and intoxicated by the sound of breaking glass, and high on teargas and burning automobile upholstery they rose to the occasion.  They’re currently putting on the brag to their friends.  Of course, the majority of folks downtown didn’t actually burn cars or smash windows.  Some did do a little freeboot looting when the opportunity arose, but mostly, they wandered around, looking animated and taking Facebook tributes with their smartphones.  They can confess their innocence — and believe me they will.  What they didn’t do, however, was leave when the cars starting burning and the cops showed up in riot gear.   The interesting question is why?

Understand that the Vancouver Riot 2011 was not an isolated event.  Like it or not, rioting and wanton destruction have become an integral part of our city.  In the eyes of the world, they’re as synonymous with Vancouver as the mountains, the ocean and the Lions Gate Bridge.  Let me explain.  Those young people, tearing the city to rags Wednesday night, were no more than children in 1994 when that generation broke apart at the seams and turned a sporting event into broken glass and mayhem.  Likewise, many of the rioters of ’94 probably weren’t even born when Vancouver hosted the “Grey Cup Riot” in 1966.  That’s three seperate generations, spread over nearly fifty years!   Do you detect a pattern here, Mr. Holmes?  Regardless of what kind of inquiries and investigations the local apologists want to come up with the only common denominator in half a century is Vancouver and young people.  Any other Johnny-come-lately explanation is just so much crap.

Take a look at the video footage; those people who fought the cops in front of the Devonshire in ‘66 were not poor, disadvantaged or oppressed.  The louts of ’94 look pretty well-dressed and well-fed to me (and to anybody else who bothers to notice.)  And this latest bunch of malcontents were mostly sporting official Canucks jerseys and recording their activities on smartphones (both expensive items.)  The evidence shows that the clearly advantaged youth of Vancouver do not respect their city and never have.  Three generations is not a coincidence.

None of this will be brought forward in any of the immediate inquiries.  They’ll round up the usual suspects: “our consumer society” and “disaffected youth.”  The police will take a couple more kicks in the stomach and the world will continue.  Just as an aside (if you think the cops are to blame) some Saturday afternoon when you’ve got nothing happening go try and subdue a vicious drunk when he’s got ten drunken friends egging him on.  Give it a shot; see how you make out.  My point is we’re not going to address the problem, just like we didn’t last time or the time before that.  We’re going to theorize and chatter about those “bad apples” again, lose some more of our ability to spontaneously enjoy our city, and carry on.

This is the reality.  We — all of us in Vancouver — have built a culture that promotes an unhealthy disrespect for the institutions of our city.  Here are a couple of items: one is small but significant; the other is very large indeed.  On Wednesday night, many members of the media referred to the rioters as “protesters.”  That was their reference point.  They weren’t vandals, arsonists, looters or criminals.  They were protesters — because we equate protest with unruly and destructive behaviour.  Legitimate protesters are permitted to cause damage and break things; it’s acceptable to us.  It’s the way we think.  Those people kicking in store windows have the same attitude.  Secondly (and this is huge) despite the assurances of the Mayor and the Premier, nobody in this city believes any of the rioters will be brought to justice.  If (by some miracle) a few do get caught, Vancouver has whole office buildings full of lawyers who thrive on this kind of thing.  After three generations of riots, I’ll bet you dollars to dead penguins nobody in this town knows anybody who’s ever gone to jail for their antisocial actions — or even had to pay for the damage they caused.  Those young people who turned us all into international idiots the other night know perfectly well they aren’t going to be held accountable.  Again, it’s the way we think.

Vancouver is ashamed of itself — and we should be — no amount of feel-good stories are going to change that.  But until ordinary people change their attitude, we have nothing to be proud of.

 

Canada Post May Strike Out

To be honest, I haven’t written a letter in over twenty years.  I haven’t mailed a cheque since the last century.  I don’t buy stamps anymore, and the only thing I get delivered regularly to my house is a magazine subscription that never seems to run out.  The post office and I don’t interact except on occasional mornings when I say hi to the letter carrier and ask her, “How’s it going?”  So why am I upset about a postal strike?

Like most Canadians I have a love/hate relationship with Canada Post.  I rarely use their services but when I do, I want them to perform perfectly.  I hate junk mail, but I want the post office to pay for itself without my tax dollars.  I think letter carriers have a cushy job, but you don’t see me hauling a heavy bag of pizza flyers around in the pouring rain.  And I’m shocked that it costs… (What does it cost?) … to mail a letter to New Brunswick, but I’m willing pay 10 times that much to follow celebrity gossip on my smart phone.  The thing is Canada Post does a really good job providing a service that very few people need anymore.  I’m worried that the union is going to destroy it before it can evolve into something useful again.

Here’s a brief history of the post office.  It doesn’t cover everything and it isn’t even totally true, but — trust me — most Canadians see it this way.  In the way back days, Canada Post was a valuable part of the Canadian landscape.  People wrote letters to each other.  They corresponded (it was like being connected but way more elaborate.)  It was the way friends and families shared their news, photographs and ideas.  Getting a letter was a big deal, and people had penpals for the specific purpose of writing to each other.  When people went on vacation, they sent postcards home.  At Christmas time, Canadians sent millions of cards to each other, just to say hi once a year.  It was the way people communicated — especially over long distances — because everybody could afford stamps.  Kids sent away for stuff that came in the mail.  Household bills were sent and paid by mail.    There were mail order catalogues and mail-in coupons.  It was an accepted way to do business.   This went on for decades.

Somewhere in the 60s going on 70s, the post office, a stalwart institution for a century, started to lose credibility.  There were tons of reasons for this, but it was mostly because escalating costs had to be passed on to the public — somehow.  Postal rates had to be increased and postal service had to be decreased — just to balance the books.  At the same time, however, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) who may or may not be called militant (depending on which side of the picket line you’re on) began flexing its muscles to get higher pay and better working conditions for its members.  The result was a series of strikes and slowdowns that stalled our country’s ability to communicate and do business.  It also soured the public’s relationship with the post office.  Ordinary people saw the union as the bad guy — a greedy loose cannon — willing and able to hold the entire country up for ransom in order to get what they wanted.  It didn’t help that most of the union bluster usually came during the last 17 shopping days before Christmas every year, either.  Over the course of the next decade, Canada Post devolved into a necessary evil, and very few people (who didn’t work there) had a good word to say about them.  The problem was, as the corporation tried desperately to stop the bleeding ($600 million deficit in 1981 alone) CUPW didn’t relent.  In reality, the exploding costs weren’t always the union’s fault — but the public saw it that way — and nobody down at CUPW saw the writing on the wall.

People started bypassing Canada Post if they wanted anything important done.  Businesses used courier services, people sent parcels by UPS or Greyhound, and lower long distance rates encouraged Aunt May to call (instead of write) when she had news.  Then along came fax machines, e-mail and the Internet.  By the mid 90s, Canada Post was irrelevant to the vast majority of Canadians.

Today, Canada Post has seriously rebounded.  By their own account, they handle 40 million pieces of mail a day, over the largest postal area in the world.  They actually make a profit every year.  Canada Post (and the people who work there) are doing a good job.  In order to guarantee that my never-ending magazine subscription would continue to show up every month Canada Post took the ingenious step of becoming one of the largest purveyors of advertising in the country.  It’s that junk mail we all know and despise; that’s what’s paying the bills.  However, this is not going to go on forever because the cash cow is drying up.  Canada is one of the most connected countries in the world — mainly because mail service had been so unreliable.  As businesses look to catch the next generation’s demographics and lower their advertising costs, they’re turning away from printing expensive paper flyers, delivered — day after day — to your door.  They’re going to the Internet faster than Canada Post can replace the lost revenue.  Our post office is slowly softening to death.

Unfortunately, the dinosaurs at the CUPW still think it’s 1965.  They believe in the antagonistic relationship between labour and management.  They don’t understand times have changed.  The downtrodden workers of the 40s and 50s have retired.  Canada Post isn’t a Third World sweatshop and everybody knows it.  After all these years, the CUPW has little or no credibility with regular Canadians.  It’s going to be very difficult for them to convince the public that workers at Canada Post are getting the shaft.  Canada Post isn’t essential anymore, and any job action will be met with indifference, at best.   A strike of any magnitude will irreparably damage Canada Post – the reason the CUPW exists in the first place.  Instead of sticking to their 19th century trade union guns, they should be trying to reinvent themselves for the 21st century.

Personally, I’m upset because I like the post office.  I don’t want to see it go under.  It’s part of what I grew up with.  If I have to read my magazine online, I’ll do it, but I’m old enough (and nostalgic enough) to hate to see a time when Canadians no longer say, “Hey, did we get any mail?”

Food Snobs and the Quinoa Hoax

I‘ve been eating quinoa for several years now.  Like most things I eat, it just showed up on my plate one day and when I didn’t whine about it, it kept coming back.  However, I had no idea quinoa was cool until I was given a free lecture the other night at a dinner party.  Apparently, quinoa is an “ancient grain” and the best thing since zippers on jeans.  It has more nutrients, phosphorents, vitamins and protein per weight by volume (or vice versa) than anything else on the planet.  It can fix migraines, heart disease and … menopause?   Its calcium content is beyond compare.  It has enough fibre in it to cure whatever ails ya.  It fights free radical, better than James Bond.  And probably if you eat enough of it you will see Jesus – if you believe in Him — or some hocus-pocus god from Uruguay (if you don’t.)  I learned quite a few things the other night, but mostly I found out that food snobs give me a shooting pain.

Let me set the record straight on quinoa.  It might be called an “ancient grain,” but first of all, it isn’t even a grain.  Google tells us that it’s not a member of the grass family; it’s an edible seed.  Plus it isn’t actually any more ancient than most of the regular grains, like wheat, that ordinary people have been eating ever since Grog the Cro-Magnon got tired of hunting and bought riverfront property in Mesopotamia — about 10,000 years ago.  And finally, Google tells us, quinoa comes from South America where it was the staple food of the Incas for thousands of years.  Everybody ate it.  They practically worshipped the stuff.  The question then becomes: if quinoa, is literally stalk and kernel above everything else ever chewed and swallowed, how come the entire Inca nation, including an army of 80,000, got their ass kicked by Francisco Pizarro and 170 Spaniards, one Saturday afternoon in 1534?  The Incas might not have suffered from migraines or menopause, but they obviously couldn’t fight very well with that muck in their belly.  For my money, I think I’d be finding out what the Spaniards had for breakfast before I started making wild claims about “ancient grains.”

Here’s the real meal deal on quinoa and most of the other trendy foods that have been creeping into our diet lately.  They’re food.  They’ve been around for thousands of years.  They taste good (if the cook knows what to do with them) and they’re better for you than 90% of the processed food you find on Safeway shelves.  That’s it.  You can make the same claims about an orange, a lamb chop or spelt the (actual) ancient grain of the Bulgarians.  Quinoa is no more or less healthy than any of those.   It has all that fibre, calcium, manganese, copper etc. in it because it comes in a bag – all by itself.  It hasn’t been processed to death.

What food snobs don’t understand is it’s not the foods we eat that cause problems.  It’s the adventures that food has to go through to get to our plate that’re bad for us.  The things processors do to food ought to be illegal.  Read the labels!  Honestly, when Wonder Bread gets hold of quinoa, there isn’t going to be enough food value left in it to keep a good-sized cat alive.  And when it finally makes it to the Munchy-Crunchy Snack Bar stage, no amount of “Vitamin C added” will be able to save it.

You don’t have to look any further than breakfast.  One of the “healthiest” breakfast cereals around advertises itself as containing something called fibre twigs and clusters of whole grains.  What the hell is a fibre twig?  Is it a small shoot from a wild fibre tree?  And, by the way, what’s holding those whole grain clusters together?  Magic?  People who eat this stuff spit on Cheerios.  There’s another “healthy” cereal on the shelf that doesn’t even call itself food.  The ads say it’s a “meal replacement.”   I’m scared to look at the list of ingredients on that one.  I don’t care what the claims are, in general, if you’re going to have breakfast out of a box, you’d be just are far ahead to eat the box.  Notice, most of the cereal ads say “part of a nutritious breakfast” and show a picture of toast and orange
juice.

This is the problem with food snobs.  They think there’s something wrong with toast and jam.  They’ll kick people out of the way to get at clusters of whole grains held together by God only knows what chemical and turn up their noses at a scrambled egg – which has absolutely every nutrient needed for human survival (cholesterol aside.)  They also don’t realize that just because nobody’s ever heard of something doesn’t always make it better for you.  Sometimes, finding that new fruit or vegetable in the health food store is the result of refrigeration and the global economy.  It’s not an Amazonic cure for cancer.  It’s just an exotic version of the ordinary apple or carrot we all grew up with.