When will I get tired of it? Well, to answer that question – today.
There’s nothing to be done. I suppose protest is an option if you don’t mind doing it from the confines of a ‘free speech zone’, which is basically a contained area that’s been fenced off and is monitored by security cameras. On top of that, there’s the reality that protests within those zones will most assuredly be infiltrated by plain clothes RCMP operatives. In short: if it sounds like, feels like, and takes like it – it must be freedom.
But there’s nothing to be done. No matter Pivot’s ‘Red Tent’ initiative, or any other plan to point out the hypocrisy of the games, they’re going to happen. You can bitch all you’d like, even if you voting against them in the 2003 plebiscite, it doesn’t much matter now. Debt’s headed our way, and we’re going to be paying that debt off for many a year to come.
As soon as it’s over one wonders how fast focus on the realities of the Downtown Lower Eastside will evaporate? As was the case before the cost of the games became an issue, I’m willing to bet things will pretty much go back to the way they were – out of sight, out of mind. The gentrification of lower Gastown will continue, the neighbourhood’s problems will continue to be swept under the rug, and no one will really notice that funding to numerous projects has diminished or completely disappeared because, in the wake of the games, they simply can’t be sustained.
The question now is not what you plan to do while the games are on, it’s what you plan to do once they’re over. It’s all well and good to jump on the bandwagon, dawn a balaclava, and play dissident for a few weeks – it’s entirely something else to take it off and continue to be an advocate for responsible change after all’s said and done. It may not be as exciting and juvenile as chanting tired slogans from within the confines of a ‘free speech zone’, but confronting real challenges and seriously tackling uncomfortable problems never is. It’s difficult, frustrating, slow, and tiresome – excitement has little to do with it.
There is nothing to be done, at least not for the time being. But don’t forget, when the smoke clears and the numbers come tumbling in, there will be those that will have to be held to account. Doing so is of prime importance, as is remaining dedicated to confronting those disparaging issues that the Olympics have highlighted. If anything, a current has been provided with which to energize people regarding the failures of this Province’s government, this city’s terrible realities, and even our own shortcomings. If, when the world leaves, we can look in the mirror and remember that we’re not as self important as we think we are, then, perhaps, the road to change will see more feet upon it than it ever has.

February 7, 2010 

