Occupy Vancouver Should Bust Our Bubble

Occupy Vancouver Protestors | BCBusiness
If Tony had his way, Occupy Vancouver would find its voice and focus its mission.

Occupy Vancouver shouldn’t go away as many want it to. It should become a real pain in the butt that awakens us to the problems of the world outside Lotus Land.

Seems there are outcries that Occupy Vancouver should be rousted from the formerly “pristine” lawns of the Vancouver Art Gallery, where protestors have set up camp.

So I have been spurred on by a commenter named Boehma to expand on my recent Occupy Vancouver blog that the movement is – I’m being generous here – kind of unfocused.

Boehma, whoever you are, you have a good point. Maybe people here think they have it too good to actually protest many of the injustices that are coming down the pipe soon.

You see, most of the propaganda we’re fed is about how great Vancouver is, how many multimillion-dollar apartments we’re throwing up, how foreign investors just love our fair city, how green we’re becoming and how, gosh darn it, we’re just so damn beautiful and perfect.

Never mind that we have some of the lowest wages in Canada; never mind that people can’t find a decent place to live within 40 kilometres of the city; never mind that our small business people are struggling as everybody starts pinching their pennies ever more.

The truth is we have poverty here – it’s just hidden. The only poverty we see is in the Downtown Eastside, where it’s really obvious. Hence the way governments spend money down there – over $60 million a year at last count, most of it going to professional social activists whose livings depend on that poverty.

But the real poverty is among ordinary people whose savings are sinking into oblivion because of stock market and interest-rate declines, whose futures look less rosy because bankers, billionaires, and politicans around the world are saving their own butts by killing what little ordinary people have done to guard themselves against the future.

There are echoes of the Dirty Thirties all over, especially in the U.S., but I guess they haven’t filtered through the self-imposed dream that most of us share in Vancouver.

Meanwhile, many are demanding that Vancouver “get rid of” those Occupy Vancouver tenters on the art gallery lawn because they’re a blight on the city.

I guess in Vancouver dirt and mud and tent homes are considered subversive.

But we’re not immune to what’s happening down South and in Europe. It will hit us eventually. Occupy Vancouver is just a little – and vague – hint of what’s to come.

So, if I had my way, Occupy Vancouver would become a real blight. It would find its voice and then be loud, noisy and in your face constantly – a Jeremiah warning us of what’s going on outside our little dreamland on the Pacific.