(photo: dignity village. click here for more photos from portland's fine contribution to humanity, and here for a 25 minute audio recording from there.)
what a joy it is to be home, and sleeping in my own bed. i'd forgotten what it is to sleep through the night. i definitely have a new appreciation for what it is to be homeless, without a bed night after night, no hope of ever attaining anything more than a mat on a crowded floor. it's no wonder mental instability is associated with homelessness. i defy anybody to live that way and keep their mental faculties in order.
at our friday coffee meeting, a casual gathering of street newz writers, vendors, supporters, i reaquainted myself with some of my local comrades, and the local street scene. there's a 'street voices' project underway, an attempt to document some of the stories. rose has found a homeless family, with two children, the youngest 2 1/2 years. they apparently moved to vancouver on the olympic promise of construction jobs. the "economy" bottomed out, campbell and crew continue to slash funding for anything even remotely connected to quality of life (now 90% of all arts funding), and another young family now lives (at least overnight) in a tent. they were recently ticketed $115 after failing to awaken their children and pack up their tent by the required time - is it 7 or 8 am, rain or shine, no exceptions. victoria officials were last year ordered to strike a bylaw that forbade such survival tactics as sleeping in tents, but they quickly moved to pass a regulation limiting the time people are able to sleep. it's just another form of torture, perhaps the most insidious.
the traveller's inn has apparently gone bankrupt, rendering another 200 people homeless. and british columbia now boasts the lowest minimum wage in canada, and let's not forget that the bc liberals (in their first term, the knuckleheads have voted for them twice since then) reduced the legal working age to 12 and introduced a 6 dollar an hour "training wage" so the corporations could hire children and rip them off. 21st century slavery - this is what we get for living in a society that is primarily focussed on profit making. it would never happen in cuba ... there's no way those people would ever allow children (or anyone else) to live in such conditions. cuba is not about fidel, though they love and appreciate that he fought for their right to self-determination. cuba is about community, plain and simple. it's a shining example of how people will treat each other when the profit motive is removed.
while visiting portland's dignity village last week i learned (click here for 25 minutes of audio, and click here for photos) that the city has coughed up about $200,000 (and a small patch of land outside the city) in total for its creation and upkeep these nine years. our city, in comparison, complains that tent cities are expensive, unsightly, magnets for drugs and prostitution. they are liars. and murderers, plain and simple. cruel and uncaring, now focussed on rushing a 63 million dollar bylaw so they can build a new bridge.
it's just a good thing we canadians don't own guns ....
home is joyful, and painful. but i love my community. last week i was gifted a super pass to the local fringe festival, a wonderful way to enjoy and support amateur thespians. and last night i sat alongside some of the very original raging grannies (those who formed the very first of what is now an international phenomenon .... i love the grannies!) and watched some more of my friends perform a parody called "the monday news," a telethon for our ailing corporate news makers. like so many other cities, we've lost another local television station and our daily newspaper is barely hanging on. a refreshing change for the quickly disappearing forests, i thought, until i read (in that very newspaper) about a gleeful forestry minister announcing that china has now decided to re-roof their homes using bc lumber. there goes the neighbourhood! as if that's not enough, i still hear my fellow victorians complaining about the rain (even as we learn from an aussie fringe performer that she lost a whopping one third of her province to fires last year, images of people carrying scarred koala bears in desperate rescue attempts), and i watch otherwise sensible tear pieces of forest (in the form of paper towels) from the dispensers in the public washrooms only to quickly discard them (just wipe your hands on your jeans!). i guess it's true, they won't know what they've got until it's gone - to the detriment of us all. and of course 'the monday news' got lousy reviews from the corporate media.
but moving along, i laughed and cringed through "pornStar," a chris craddock production about a conservative and fundamentalist mp's daughter who travels to a porn movie award ceremony she's been nominated for after a boyfriend secretly taped their physical antics, only to fall in love with a female sex advice columnist. it's a one woman performance, convincingly acted, with some really funny one liners.
and then "fall fair," another incredible jayson mcdonald creation. again, one actor playing many parts - an irish carnie, a stoner who convinces his friend to take a play day, a dad and his daughter, a teenage girl and, of course, lobster man - a freakish fair attraction. he got a standing ovation.
i got all teary-eyed at "japanglish," about a japanese canadian girl and the cultural divide between her and her parents. yumi ogawa plays all three roles, convincingly transforming her being as she shows us snippets of her life from all those perspectives.
then there's the monty pythonesque "war of 1812." i knew we'd kicked the yankees out several times, until brian mulroney (the traitor) signed nafta and the invasion was sanctioned, but i don't remember learning that canadians played a part in burning down the 'presidential palace' - now known as the white house.
the rosa parks team of young women did some pretty spontaneously funny improv routines, and two women offered up an interpretive dance performance that seemed to be about young girls and their experiences with nature. very tranquil, gentle, beautiful, calming.
so i'm off, after a full night's sleep in my own bed, for another afternoon/evening of fringing thanks to kim and her busy schedule helping organize next weekend's anarchist book fair. it's definitely good to be home, even with all its imperfections.
