Some years ago I asked a rather inebriated crowd at a large festival in Edmonton to go and rip down one of those giant inflatable beer cans. No less than five minutes later I saw it, off in the distance, topple over.

Five minutes after that I was electrocuted, and I am by no means joking – I got the heart monitor and the whole nine yards.

Karma’s tricky like that.

I received an email this morning that was extremely troubling, so I decided soon after reading it that it was best to remove my recent entry about the destruction of the Olympic clock in front of the Art Gallery. Let’s just say that I don’t want anything that I’ve written to be used to incite others to violent action that could result in the harm of others. The destruction of a symbol without harming anyone is one thing, but I’ll not be a point of influence for others lean on to justify violence.

I also want to clarify the impetus for yesterday’s entry. A few of us were sitting here discussing the gentrification of Gastown in Vancouver’s Lower East Side and began comparing the impact that the Olympics will surely have on this neighbourhood to the transformation that was seen during Expo 86 – yes I am that old.

During Expo, Vancouver’s homeless were pushed east down the Hastings corridor, local slum lords transforming their piss-stained hovels into passable ‘hostel’ type hotels to house foreign tourists. The staff at those hotels were suddenly wearing shirts and ties standing behind new front desks in freshly carpeted lobbies. Vancouver’s Lower East Side was transformed, for a time, into a lie. Even local residents who had rented in the downtown core for years found themselves facing drastic rent increases, forcing many to move.

At the end of the day, this city belongs to the people who live here. One of the most popular investment tricks in this city at present is to purchase a condo and then rent it out to pay it off. Rent increases over the last few years have been drastic because of it, rendering Vancouver the most expensive place to live in the entire country. Rent for a 600 sq ft apartment in the downtown core run from anywhere between $1000 to $2,000 dollars a month depending on the neighborhood. Compare that with Winnipeg, Calgary, or even Toronto.

The reality of Vancouver is that there is a massive gulf between the affluent and the poor. While the city has grown and become far more cosmopolitan in my 15 years of living downtown, it has also become extremely arrogant and utterly forgetful of those that do not fit into its expanding bourgeois niche. And the sad truth is that most Vancouverites could care less about what happens in neighbourhoods like the Lower East Side, where First Nations individuals such as Frank Paul are dumped in back allies by the police only to freeze to death. So why even be outraged at the massive waste of money that’s going to spend the next three years counting down to the 2010 Winter Olympics? The truth is, for the most part, the majority of you reading this that are here in town won’t feel any significantly negative impact from the games. In fact, many of you will probably take the brand new highway that they’ve expanded all the way up the coast’s fragile wilderness to watch events at Whistler, or spend enormous amounts of money trying to get tickets to see Team Canada play hockey.

A few blocks away from GM Place, in the neighbourhood in which I live, which is even now being transformed into the next Yaletown, visitors from all over the world will gleefully spend their money on trinkets and smoked salmon and native art, many of them returning to rooms at hotels and apartment buildings that have been transformed specifically for the games, their rates raised through the roof. And just as in 1986, the mentally ill, the downtrodden and homeless, be they drug addicts or not, will be swept under the rug for a few weeks, only to emerge to the usual fist full of pennies spent on programs to help them.

Meanwhile, across town, a group of assholes will be sitting on some patio in Vancouver’s epicenter of jackassdom lighting cigars with twenty dollar bills and claiming the entire thing a massive success.

Vancouver, showcased and broadcast to the world, will attract further investment and new arrivals and slip further and further away from being the place that I knew as a boy. Some might call that the inevitability of progress. To that I would point to those unfortunates that even now find themselves displaced in these streets and alleys, and ask them - what good is progress without actual social progression?

Leave the clock alone. Truth is, we’ve all been bought and paid for already anyway.

Follow Up

As an aside, do some checking into how much the new transportation line between the airport and Yaletown is costing. And if you do, realize that that is not a part of the official Olympic budget.