Social Rendering

A History

There has been media coverage on the Downtown Eastside's (DTES) activist community proclaiming the business community is the gentrifier of their community. But, originally Hastings Street and Gastown constituted the main business hub of Vancouver and 'old' office buildings were converted into residences in response to the social housing shortages created by Expo 1986. The City pushed the poor off Davie Street into DTES. Business always demands the transient subculture off its door step. It is the choice of the people elected to run the municipality on how that demand is met that results in the culture of their new neighbourhood.

It is unfortunate the present culture of the DTES still rallies divisiveness: Us v Them.  It has been this way for as long as I've known the neighbourhood. In 1994 there was DERA's internal fighting with who was the Executive Director, Jim Green or Barb Daniels. The latter won out, but the former was given a mid-management position in the provincial government. The divisiveness continued to flourish due to all the players, named and their supporters, behaving within the realm of corruption. The manifestations remain in every crook and cranny, and those bred to it knowing nothing different, and it is nurtured by the whole City, itself.  The corrupt include those with the blinders of not-in-my-backyard.

The corrupt deny there are choices. It has to be this way for the paradigm of victim to exist: For every victim there must be a perpetrator. A parallel paradigm exists with every emancipator there is a collaborator, and they embrace the realms of choice.

Choice requires an acknowledgement of Us v Them, but only from the perspective of defining the parts of the whole. Choice also reveres the responsibilities of its processes and results. It proclaims openly when it wears the blinders, for choice is the voice of creation.

A Revolution

Is it possible for the corrupt to take up the mantel of choice?  Of course, for that is the purpose of creation: the more invocation of choice results in an expansion of creation. Even the corrupt exist within creation, the difference is theirs is short lived.

The collective is on the verge of a rendering the awareness of choice.

Hastings Street is meeting the needs of the new demands with the influx of creative individuals gathering within its population. The area's growth is for naught. It is change due to choice, and with that choice there comes more choice.

My Choice

I have lived this homeless existence with the question of how to break the juggernaut of the Us v Them paradigm, so that I can have the survival tool thus enabling an expansion of my thriving needs. Without shelter (one of three sacred survival requirements) my choices of activity is restricted to shortening my life.  It is the juggernaut of the corrupt, the outside force that has invaded my space and needs lancing.

The lancing can only be done when light is used to define the dark images of ourselves, the communities. I choose to give you a light.

The Episode

Yesterday, amid the deep slushy streets on the south side of Victory Park I saw this man taking

advantage of the emptiness to create. 

On the northeast corner there was another man and his creation required a shovel.

This is Wes Regan. He was cleaning away the snow from the drainage grate so that the melting water would not pool. When this happens there is no safe place for pedestrians to cross the streets, and the cars splash the water up to the sidewalks. The only solution is to clear the grates of the heavy snow, and this requires man power the City couldn't possibly arrange efficiently or economically.

Wes probably recognizes the need more than most because he's the Executive Director of Hastings Crossing Business Improvement Association.  All in all, it took him about an hour to do a couple of blocks worth of shoveling. In that time he was given tea from one cafe and a breakfast muffin from another, and said, "They would have done the same for anyone (else), I'm sure".

I told Wes that I had just concluded a tour of western cities to see what poverty and homelessness was like in them, and it had inspired me to share the moments of kindness to create a better society.  Wes and I share the belief we can have a kinder community and easier life when we each do something to help another.  It is these moments of choice when collaboration blossoms into the recognition we are all part of the whole.

We all belong, including the corrupt.  Our purpose and need is to have a balance between the dark and light.

En garde, Magnat.

1994 was a naive time.

There were groups of us sitting around the tables believing we were there to make a difference in our lives. In this belief many of us saw government employees as being partners, ergo democracy in direct action: and, again, Vancouver leads the country with an innovative Canadianism!

We were diligent in our meetings, keeping the decisions on course with how we saw the medical system would best meet the needs of everyone. We studied our communities, met as citizens of the city and province, learned the communication skills the bureaucracy had been learning, wrote and shared our reports, and gave our hearts to what we knew would have the best outcomes. It was to be the final, not beginning stages of the Vancouver Health Board.

Quickly it came from the government the service boundaries had to be divided differently. They knew the money flow, so we posed no argument and continued to make plans as to how we include the new neighbourhoods into our plan for the Vancouver/Richmond Health Board. In quick succession the names and boundaries kept changing and every neighbourhood across the Lower Mainland (22 municipalities surrounding the Fraser River delta) no longer had input to any plan's implementation.

Fast forward through the Drunken-Campbell-BC, where addictions developed into big business for the province. In fact, along with cannabis, the continent's pharmaceutical industry found another group of subjects to test and sell their new found mood-altering concoction, methadone. The Downtown Eastside in Vancouver and Whalley in Surrey are the Lower Mainland's focus to find test subjects, and methadone-only pharmacies have popped up like daisies. One Surrey pharmacist plied flyers for his delivery service ($80. per prescription) to his strongest client base's residential complex. (photo to come)

Many of the generational homeless are raised or migrate to these two areas: It is much easier for the urban poor to make a camp in park-filled Surrey, or have a floor mat in Vancouver than any where else in Canada. Besides, the Lotus lands are always found in the port cities, or those that longshoremen reside in, because that's where the pirates, aka gangsters, have historically plied their trade.

1912 Vancouver businessmen successfully lobbied the provincial government to have the merchant-class ships unload in their port.  Originally the plan was Prince Rupert, because it was a 55-hour shorter route from Singapore, but the Vancouverites were better sleeping partners. A century later Jim Pattison has changed this - and he's been a BC pirate since his infamous 1970's pornographic smuggling - back to Prince Rupert, and that lovely, little coastal community is about to be the hub of ugly; The pirates are sure to moor and leave a wake of destruction up and down the eastern Pacific coast and along the hunting grounds of the Yellowhead Highway, aka Highway 16, right into Edmonton. Pattison has the two western provinces tied into a juggernaut of pig farm proportions, and the psychopaths are salivating.

The State of Addiction

There is a nasty cocktail brewing in Vancouver under the auspices of Mental Health care. The most recent document outlining the new care model is pure plagiarism from the 1990's studies commissioned for the BC Ministry of Health and the City of Vancouver. (How do I know? I was involved in the community and co-wrote some of those studies and had the others in my possession as reference to our recommendations of health care in the neighbourhood.)

The difference is the new document "Improving Health Services for Individuals with Severe Addiction and Mental Illness" (November 15, 2013, Ministry of Health Report to the Honourable Terry Lake) is full of language to describe the estimated 130,000 people as if they are totally incapable of anything, and all their rights are stripped. The revolving door of incarceration-to-the-street is assured.

These people are being video-monitored while they stay in the shelters, because they have no home, and teams of so-called professionals will bound them off to the hospital to be forced to take "treatment" of anti-psychotics, anti-depressants, methadone and electric shock therapy.  Their diet in and out of hospital is predominately refined starches, little in the way of fresh vegetables and fruit, and heavy fat proteins.

These authors have actually used the homeless population numbers and assigned them to their definition of severe addictions and mental health to validate their intended treatment program. Instead of solving homelessness, they're keeping it alive so they have their subjects to torture.

10 days to go

Early to bed...

I've done everything needed to be doing and the space is closed for production.  Damn, time on my hands.

No creative outlet only results in one thing, the letter writing campaign against Bad Dog about their service. I have the confirmation, I need, that a breach happened with their last upgrade and they haven't got the guts to admit it, let alone the other infractions of CRTC regs.

I have the spare time only because the project was solely in my hands and I didn't have to account to anyone a timeline or explain part way through the how's and why's of any of it. I just got on with the tasks at hand.

I'm in no one's Army. I don't have time.

http://www.belkinhouse.ca/

The 12 days of...

Yeeeeeeeeehaw!

I'll be ready for display as of the 16th.

Every single thing is satisfactory and I'm proud of accomplishing what I have done: Three beaded-stain glass works; one triptych and four separate wall pieces; and, six art boxes.  This whole experience is exhilarating against the backdrop of being homeless.

BC Housing and everyone else who has been actively trying to destroy the beautiful life I can make will be wearing egg on their faces come the 26th. You all failed.  Your denial of your mental health status is the root of your failure to yourselves.

16 Days to Go.

This shot is from the Sally Ann's window, today.

My sixth and last box art project will be complete for the show. Next week I have to get my outfit ready. 

In the last two days I've hit the pavement with the postcards and have invited nearly 200. I've got some more time next week, since we're shutting the studio down on the 19th, to pound the pavement in another section of downtown. Easy work, but my lower limbs scream at me. Ain't easy being arthritic, let alone green ;)

September 8, 2013

Daily Observation

Another day in Vancouver. It's changed, this city. Far more people in a smaller place and, thankfully, far more polite than Surrey.

It always felt like too much attention was directed towards me by the majority's choice to hunt for a target .-  And, who is more vulnerable than a single, white, non-parental female in this day and age?  Talk about being a visible minority! - Surrey's citizens interact under the auspices of vindictiveness.  It needs more honest RCMP members, imho.

At first the idea of returning to live in Vancouver didn't appeal, but having been here for more than a week there is a symbiosis of the un and familiar.

...I"m still homeless. November 15, 2013 to now?  I'm impecunious.