By Sasha Moedt (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: November 16, 2011
Occupy Vancouver has seen a lot of grief these few past weeks. A central concern in the Vancouver mayoral elections, the media focus has tightened its lens on the small tent-city in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery. The media attention is varied, but leans to the negative in its opinion on the protest.
Ashlie Gough’s death at 23-years-of-age, resulting from a heroin overdose, two days after a different occupier survived an overdose, brings forth critical issues surrounding the Occupy movement for those supporting and opposing it. The city of Vancouver is quickly assessing the safety of the set-up, while Mayor Gregor Robertson is quickly hopping down from the fence to the increasingly popular “dismantle” side.
The occupiers have been ordered to take a number of precautions for fire safety standards, including orders to: remove all unoccupied tents, create a separation of three feet between all tents, remove all tarps covering multiple tents, and to create a continuous path of travel within the encampment.
Ashlie Gough was visiting friends who were a part of Occupy, she apparently wasn’t a part of the movement herself. Despite this, a drug-free, safe Occupy Vancouver is entirely necessary. While the occupiers must remain unyielding on their cause, they should comply with the city’s demands and avoid seeing it as submitting to what they’re fighting against. Among the most rational and reasonable of us, the base truth of the matter is this: if you don’t listen, no one will listen to you. Occupiers need to draw healthy attention to themselves, with their perseverance, community and cause. They need to keep things organised and their momentum strong.
The city’s demands are perfectly reasonable. There are comments floating around on the immoderate attention the city is paying to Occupy Vancouver’s safety restrictions, they are silent on the matter of the slum-like conditions of the housing for the poverty stricken of Vancouver. Of all the deaths by drug overdose on the streets of Vancouver, why did Ashlie Gough’s spur Robertson to such decisiveness? What about the homeless people’s safety conditions? Yet these questions don’t seem valid. It’s not about the attention paid by the Vancouver Fire Department, Police and Mayor to Occupy. It’s about the media’s fixation on the municipality’s attention. It isn’t a fair representation, and this speculation is only creating unnecessary animosity. Because, wouldn’t it be nice if it really was just good against evil? But it isn’t.
Naturally, the homeless would gravitate to a warm place with a medical station, tents, safety and an attitude of caring camaraderie. These people are the victims of whose cause the Occupy movement is fighting for – the forgotten, the neglected, the needy. But the tents can’t start looking like a mini-slum, even if that could be a perfect metaphor – some of the people we’re trying to convince don’t get metaphors. Occupiers should keep things aesthetically pleasing. We are trying to bring awareness, and in this way trying to convince.
Stewart Brinton of The Province wrote one such message of misunderstanding “I suspect someone associated with Occupy Vancouver got her the drugs and may have even injected her and left her in the tent where she was found. There are dark, drug-addled energies at Occupy Vancouver,” he wrote.
Do you really think that these people are living on the cold streets in front of the Vancouver Art gallery to party, do drugs and avoid paying rent? Do you really believe people with the passion and dedication enough to plant themselves in the midst of the ugly grey concrete—in a movement that has spread across the world—facing winter, violent riot police officers, and ill-informed, self-righteous citizens like Stewart Brinton, are just lazy druggies?
But occupiers can’t brush him aside. Brinton isn’t the bad guy; some don‘t believe there are any of those. It’s just people trapped in a system that makes it too easy to be selfish. It’s a system that suppresses compassion and understanding by separation, a system of warped values that creates this terrible detachment. Brinton is the type that occupiers are trying to help understand what’s wrong with this system.
“Time to tear Occupy Vancouver down,” Brinton wrote: “It isn’t what it pretends to be.” That’s fine for you to say. Is your democracy what it pretends to be?
