Fight for your cause

Threats to a long-running activist festival test the state of activism today

by Michael Millard

The “Under the Volcano Festival” has been held annually in North Vancouver’s Cates Park for the past 16 years. Visitors coming solely for the music find themselves inundated with calls for social justice. No wonder: it is BC’s largest activism festival. This year’s event hosted over 90 different pressure groups, including the Anti-Poverty Committee, the World Peace Forum, and the Work Less Party.

The event is hosted in partnership with the indigenous Tsleil-Waututh Nation, which has inhabited the park continually for at least 3,000 years. Despite a strong connection to the community and its promotion of healthy political discourse, the festival may not return next year if the District of North Vancouver has its way.

“Council has informed us that they plan to enforce the sunset clause in our contract,” said Under the Volcano founder Irwin Oostindie, as he picked up garbage the day after the event. “There were no problems, no alcohol. We have great community support. It would be unfortunate to say goodbye, because there is obviously a public appetite for this type of event.”

The sunset clause was created in 2000 to facilitate the development of new events in North Vancouver and to encourage mature festivals to seek private funding. Upon review, financial support for Under the Volcano may be discontinued.

Since the activist content of the event precludes any corporate involvement, sponsorship will be hard to find, and organizers may have to move to a different venue, despite Cates Park’s historical significance. (It’s said that author Malcolm Lowry wrote the novel that gave the Festival its name while living in a shack near the beach in the late 1940s.)

While there is no guarantee the festival will be refused funding, given the reactionary nature of North Vancouver Council and that area’s pro-business, upper-middle-class leaning, there is a good chance the activists will be squeezed out of the park, just like the hippie squatters were in the 1970s.

Council is betting that the same people who attended Under the Volcano to pin foul messages to an effigy of BC’s premier and to throw pinecones at cardboard cut-outs of George W. and his cronies, won’t bother to turn out when the issue comes up for review. As earnest as intentions were at the park on a Sunday in August, it falls to the same group of supporters to fight for the Festival’s continued existence, and most people don’t have the time.

It is this “slack in the system,” the difference between a person’s potential influence in governmental affairs and his or her actual influence, that allows governments big and small to bureaucratically skate around the question of public opinion, and institute changes according to an agenda. (See Robert Dahl on this, in Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City.)

Most professionals—educated and upwardly mobile people of good standing in their communities—use their resources for purposes other than gaining influence over governmental decisions. There are promotions and raises to earn, children to entertain, recreational vehicles to race. Those who do well under the current system have no desire to alter it, even if they hold the most potential for affecting change. They accept the rules.

Democratic systems remain stable when a majority of the electorate accepts the rules. Most people recognize what they must do to be successful within a system, and while some achieve their goals, others do not. The rules, like the one that says you must have a job to get a loan to get a car, outline for individuals what is expected of them, and people generally accept these challenges. Citizens try hard to achieve success within society’s boundaries, as well as in accordance with their own personal values and capabilities.

There is a strong correlation between people who resist these rules or who find unjust restrictions among the guidelines, and people who have not found success in business, in relationships, or in the capitalist system of North America.

Some battered souls “fall through the cracks,” as the saying goes, and become either an enemy of the state, or the responsibility of the state. Those who struggle under the system have little power to change it because they do not contribute significantly to it in the first place.

The keynote address at this year’s Under the Volcano Festival was entitled “Youth on the Rise.” Its purpose was to strengthen solidarity among young people and to acknowledge the importance of a generation that will see a further decline in natural resources, the continued destruction of the environment, and the ongoing dominance of a merging collection of multinational corporations, unless major change takes place. Will this be the generation that makes necessary changes to a system indifferently spinning out of control?

Youth in general sit low on the scale of those in a position to change the rules. Those who hold slightly more influence are the group of young professionals snapping up junior positions from greying Boomers. Characterized as the “yupster” subculture of hip, techno-savvy twenty-somethings, this is a success-driven group concerned very little with politics. Material goods, status, and personal comfort take precedence over political issues, aside from activism triggered by the elimination of parking spaces.

There is also a counter-movement more characteristic of the crowd at the festival. These are the youth who see folly in the current level of consumption, to whom “need” and “want” mean different things.

This is an educated group, too. They recognize that encouraging people to buy-buy-buy (and acquire debt-debt-debt) is a manipulative enterprise. They see the manner in which our values as a society have moved downward, toward the bottom line. It’s hard not to see it. It is written on billboards, in the sky, on the bus, in the market, in the newspaper, popping-up online.

But how much influence can these people have if they don’t buy into the system? To what extent can they take up the slack in the system?

Unfortunately, most of the slack belongs to people who will not tighten it unless their home is to be bulldozed for the new Rapid Transit line. The youth craving change are being systematically excluded from organizations built for profit. It is hard for people to get a job that fits their values. It is hard to fight for change that will cost people money.

The aspiring activists at Under the Volcano need to devote some of their own resources to this particular cause, to ensure the continued public celebration of a whole series of causes. One District Councillor, Ernie Crist, has agreed to put forth a motion to continue funding the festival, but he emphasizes that it will not pass Council unless there is strong public endorsement.

“It will be a fight. This motion will not succeed unless the community shows its support. These young activists need to learn to fight for a cause.”

Pacifism has never changed the world. Indeed, no significant change will ever happen without a fight, and so we must sacrifice and learn to hit back.

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