<Critical Mass is a monthly cycle ride in Vancouver, growing in popularity each month, which has start points and a destination but no planned route between these.>
So let me get this straight. The gasoline addicted drivers, the Mayor (Happy Planet) and the Chief of Police (I see a stapler) don't like the once a month Critical Mass bike ride because it is not formally organized, doesn't post its route in advance, may delay the journeys of others and can cause tension with other road users.
What exactly then is the twice daily car commute? Drivers in their tens of thousands leave their houses without posting a formal route, join in what is essentially a huge game of follow my leader without any rules, able to change direction and route without any consultation, cause massive gridlock, pollution and delays for others, and slow down or endanger travellers using other modes of movement.
This lemming like event happens twice a day, every working day and yet is seen as normal. Isn't this the point of the Critical Mass monthly ride? By reducing the situation to the absurd it forces us to reconsider what we see as normal, and view car obsession and commuting as repetitive, thoughtless and addicted behaviour.
Imagine the response if car drivers ('...because there are so many involved...') had to post their routes in advance, keep the police informed of their overall intentions, identify leaders, and enter into discussions with the authorities about the effect of their journeys on other road users.
Sort of harm reduction for gasoline addicts. Sounds fine to me.
Just ask the police and doctors on the front line - harm reduction doesn't work
MARGARET WENTE
The Globe and Mail
July 12, 2008
VANCOUVER -- Sergeant Mark Steinkampf knows every back alley in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. He greets the regulars by name and doesn't miss much. On street patrol one balmy evening, he spots a new face - a young, attractive woman on a bicycle. He motions her to stop.
"I can see that crack pipe in your bra there," he says. He pulls it out and dangles it in the air. "You're under arrest. Let me read you your rights." He drops the crack pipe and crushes it beneath his shoe.
The woman doesn't have drugs on her. If she's smart, she'll get out of here fast and he'll never see her again. If she's not, her prospects aren't good. A year from now, she'll likely be ravaged by drugs and infections, turning tricks to get the money for a fix. If she's very unlucky, she'll wind up like another girl, whose body was found by a dumpster, stuffed into a plastic bag like so much garbage.
Vancouver is famous for its innovative approaches to drug treatment. Twenty years ago, it launched a bold experiment to tackle the problems of the notorious Downtown Eastside. The guiding idea was harm reduction. If you couldn't cut off the drug supply or jail all the addicts, then at least you could reduce the secondary damage - HIV, hepatitis and the like - by giving people clean needles. You would surround them with medical and social services. Addiction, all agreed, was an illness, and addicts deserved compassion and respect.
A work in progress - Stephen
An Hour or So With a Mexican Scribe
From The Washington Post
Is this the way ahead?
Seemingly backwards?
The wonderful Schumacher used the phrase 'intermediate technology' to refine the distinction between tools which put the power into the producers of the tools and home made tools which perhaps don't offer the mechanical advantage necessary.
In the villages of old, imagined societies, not everyone did everything. You had a fletcher - putting the flights on arrows, a blacksmith - shoeing horses, a baker - baking the bread.
A local person was skilled and revered for their skill. That skill was passed down through families. It grew upon a natural aptitude as well as something in the blood.
So no one failed. The large boned blacksmith wasn't forced to use his large fingers to be clumsy with delicate feathers.
In today's societies we are somehow made addicted to self-sufficiency.
I recall an incident about 20 years ago when the sister of a friend of mine wanted her bicycle serviced and asked me to do this for her. I remember being very angry at her refusal to learn from me how to do it herself. I had become obsessed with the self-reliant, we must all do everything approach and this incident exposed my unease with it.
So the story of Mexican scribes using electric typewriters to compose bills, love letters or contracts seems refreshing.
In westernized Vancouver, obsessed with formal learning, of course this would combat the idea of an educated population.As Daniel Quinn points out in 'My Ishmael' and Ivan Illich says everywhere, a child knows everything they need by about 12 years old. The last six years just turn them into insatiable consumers. Consumers of goods and of 'training'.
*** *** ***
So the poor people who did not write would be sent to school in shame and pity.
Equality would be cited; you have to be equal Equally dependant on capitalist baubles and trinkets.
The electric typewriter scribes would be sent for 'upgrading', in shame and pity, to become obsessed with computers and be current or modern and keeping up with the times.
But why should everyone be able, read lonely and independent, enough to know how to do everything that the educational and capitalist society wants?
Could it be that capitalism needs everyone to do everything to sell more of everything?
The photographer used to be called in to take photographs, now everyone has to have a digital camera.
So instead of one camera per say 1000 people there are 500.
A true graphic designer or illustrator used to be a talented person who had a gift.
Now everyone with a computer and a silly amonut of money to buy Photoshop thinks they are talented instead of just tooled.
Every house in a street has its own lawnmower, electric drill and other assorted owned tools used so infrequently that sharing could reduce dependency by perhaps 100 to 1/
So the illiterate would swap their illiteracy for dependence on typewriter and computers.
The social interaction with the scribes would be gone.
The scribes would have no work.
But everyone would have imbibed the expectation to purchase expected tools and be so called self-sufficient.
Progress.
Exactly.....
Saturday » June 14 » 2008
Why do cellphone users condemn us to share their tiresome chatter?
John Martin
Special to The Province
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
One evening back in the dreadful '70s, four or five of us decided to venture from the bland cul-de-sacs of Richmond and check out the mean streets of skid row.
It was yet to be known as the Downtown Eastside, and was more pitiful than dangerous at the time.
True, there was a fair bit of heroin. But for the most part, Main and Hastings was a refuge for low-income pensioners who spent the bulk of their waking hours in the many beer parlours that lined the streets.
The first thing we noticed upon entering one of these watering holes was the staggering decibel level.
But there was no music -- and upon closer examination, almost everyone was sitting by themselves, babbling incoherently to no one in particular.
I was reminded of this image last week while riding the West Coast Express from Mission to the Waterfront Station.
It had been years since I rode the train and things were remarkably different this time.
Every second person was chattering on their cellphone the entire trip.
It didn't matter what car or level I moved to, I didn't detect a single, normal conversation between two passengers seated side by side.
Instead, people were literally screaming into their phones and had zero apprehension about how public their conversations were.
Somewhere along the line -- and cellphones are not the sole reason -- we have collectively opted to forfeit any semblance of personal space.
Recall in the days of phone booths how we'd always glare at the next person waiting to make a call if they stood too close?
Everyone closed the door and typically cupped the receiver to minimize the possibility of strangers eavesdropping.
Similarly, when we would use the row of pay phones in malls or hotel lobbies, we'd move as far away from the next person as the cord would allow, to maintain some privacy.
And those in line fully understood the etiquette of the day to stand several feet away, much as we tend to do with ATM machines in modern times.
But now there is absolutely no concern over who hears our conversations, no matter how personal.
Given that most people talk two or three times louder than they need to on a cell, it would seem we actually want the world to listen in on our business.
This isn't simply about being rude and annoying.
It's also about people having delusions of self-importance and insisting on sharing their life stories.
Unfortunately though, most people aren't nearly as interesting as they apparently think they are.
And given all the blather I had to endure on the train last week, I'd say many aren't even as interesting as, well, the old rummies in that beer parlour on Hastings Street 30-odd years ago.
Contact John Martin, a criminologist at the University of the Fraser Valley, at John.Martin@ucfv.ca
© The Vancouver Province 2008
Copyright © 2008 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.
CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.
Globe editorial
The rights of drug addicts
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
May 29, 2008 at 6:09 AM EDT
Insisting that a Vancouver clinic be allowed to provide potentially life-saving supervision for heroin and cocaine addicts to inject their drugs, as a British Columbia judge did this week, is the right thing to do. It's right as a policy choice, but it's also right as a use of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to protect addicts from the arbitrary reach of the criminal law.
Shelagh
visits with Dr. Gabor Mate, the staff physician at the Portland Hotel.
It's an addiction treatment centre and residence in Vancouver's
downtown eastside. Mate introduces Shelagh to some of his patients. And
he talks about his new book, "In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts: Close
Encounters With Addiction" which presents some controversial ideas on
the roots of addiction and ways to treat addicts.
