Protestors as Failures!

Protestors as Failures!

The downtown eastside of Vancouver, BC is the poorest postal code in Canada. While the majority of readers are American we can all relate to the challenge of homelessness on urban living. In Vancouver the situation is compounded with the coming 2010 Olympics. In a four-block walk in my neighborhood I can find three ‘No 2010’ graffiti tags.
    The problem is not the Olympics themselves, though issues have been raised over the possible lingering debt and the so-called ‘protest zones’ where protestors will be encouraged to do their free speechmaking. The former city government promised all sorts of things around affordable housing and funding to DTES programs. As the Olympics draw closer few of these have shown up and the current city government struggles to pick up the slack. 
    There are many organizations doing the good work to fight homelessness and bureaucracy that is so often indebted to maintaining the ‘we/them’ dichotomy. Too often in a global city – a Vancouver, a Seattle, a New York, and a Chicago – young urban progressives become enamored with various causes-of-the-week. This one nightstand approach of advocacy sees people flitting from protest to protest with out any real investment of heart of energy into a cause.
    If we view the one-night stand as a the fast food of relationships – the acquiring and disposing of a partner with out further investment – then this sort of advocacy is the one night stand of justice work. In Vancouver one of the jokes is that Vancouverites have to go shopping before every protest in order to ‘look the part’ of whatever cause they are a part of, furthering the comparisons to consumer practices.
    Any serious call to action on the part of the homeless is a call to a deep relationship with our common humanity. To fly past the actual human experience of homelessness in order to play the part in large, theatric protests does no one any good. Any good world changing activity requires time, energy and votes. To address the issue of homelessness in an Olympic city like Vancouver those passionate about the cause must keep their elected officials feet to the fire through advocacy and voting.
    Beyond this the work of advocacy can be done through the furthering of human relationships. If the homeless of any of the global cities are causes and not friends and partners then the work is to naught. To engage in party-advocacy is to abandon the sphere of common dialogue. To enter into world changing action requires we engage in a deep love with our brothers and sisters in humanity, to the point of a committed relationship not to a cause but to a people