It took me quite a long time to read a disagreement thread between Occupy Vancouver supporters on Facebook, so much so that by the time I had reached the end of it and darted to one of the links included in it (another epic ravel of back and forth and meander) I could no longer recall what the disagreement that had endless comments was exactly about. (Corporate toilets and the use of was one objector’s rant, the ethics of other supporters another, and on and on. Really they could have been fighting over the size of a raisin. )
I tried to read another list of demands but three paragraphs down my gaze had wandered.
Yesterday however it took me no time at all to comprehend how many mainly aboriginal women continue to be missing or have been murdered, as another male was charged with the murder of four women in or near Prince George.
It is not difficult for me to understand this question either:
“..“When will it stop? Who will stop these men preying on our women?” shouted Cee Jai Julian, a Carrier-Sekani woman originally from Fort St. James.
An emotional Julian, who collapsed in grief and was assisted by Mona Woodward of the Aboriginal Front Door Society, said she knew some of the allegedly murdered northern B.C. women.”
On Saturday at the protest I wondered why 4000 people do not turn out to the Missing Women’s memorial march each year?
Today I read the Occupy Vancouver protestors had joined the march for the missing women and the protest at the Missing Womens Inquiry that’s currently happening.
A global movement that is formed by satellite uprisings or groupings does not need to brand itself with identical slogans and actions. It needs to situate itself in the local and the immediate where it is. I am glad to see something of this emerging.
Late to the gate I may be, but I am on fire having caught up with the details of Theresa Treacy vs the ESB and eirGrid (however the hell you spell it).
I think Theresa should get the Nobel for standing up to these bullies. I am sick to the back teeth of women being bullied this way. (And believe me I have come up against bullies myself this year) To think she was languishing in a prison cell, while these madman duffers are barrelling across her land on Quads and pulping her trees to the ground.
Sweet effin’ Jesus.
On the upside, when I read about the courage and steadfast determination she displayed it reminds me there’s nothing like the determined Irish woman. I am delighted to be the offspring of one and the descendent of many more. My mother reported she’d her own words had with the ESB when they came onto her land and flattened all her grass. No better woman for the job!
It reminds me how much I miss such women in my daily life. I can hear the echos of them as I type and they make me smile. And you’ll be able to meet one in my forthcoming novel Malarky this spring.
One of the things I miss most about Dublin is the way people you know or are acquainted with respond to you when they meet you in the street.
Vancouver could learn something from Dublin in this regard.
It has no idea what it is missing.
I once met a man on Granville St who said I was the only person he’d spoken to the entire day. We were standing beside a kerbstone preacher at the time who was bellowing into a loud hailer while someone else of preacherly extraction was playing the guitar. Said male then started shouting very loudly at the Preacher that he was evil and compared him to the a number of leading and historical despots.
See? Incredible things happen when people have a chat….
“Still he stayed in the sunshine. The city was noisy and good-humoured . The people in the streets he decided had open minds… The people of his city were happy-go-lucky, unpretentious and often unambitious”
“Neil McKay loved his city for its adolescence, its precocity, its humanity, its cheek..”
Nine O’Clock Gun. A Novel of Vancouver. Roland Wild (first published 1952)
Yesterday I attended the Occupy Vancouver protests twice, inbetween I occupied the library and read a novel that held descriptions that perfectly matched what I had experienced an hour earlier in front of the art gallery.
On Friday it had occurred to me how sometimes one’s mental weather can be very at odds with the physical weather outside the window. A mis-match. I was pondering this …
Yesterday, Saturday, in contrast I found the literary weather of 1952 (well an occasional paragraph) was the perfect match for the spirit of the streets. A strange, yet uplifting co-incidence. More evidence of the need to pay attention to the continuum and not be so focused only on what’s coming off the production line.
A reoccurring question I have as I read BC/Vancouver fiction is who were these novelists writing to? I’m with Ethel Wilson en ce moment and I do have the sense the novel (Swamp Angel) is written to a reader who is “elsewhere”.
Has this changed? Does it matter? Is there a degree of apologizing in advance? The introductory swathe to “where we are” is curious, the need to situate.
I begin to see musical genres within this fiction ….
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On the other side of the road non-fiction, the range of what’s been written is so extensive, I wonder if there’s anything left that hasn’t been considered in relation to the local. (cows, bridges, CFL are all covered)