Free Press

It’s the ads in Shared Vision that spook me. They almost all feature stoned-looking people staring out somewhere through and behind my head as though messages from the intergalactic mother ship were coming in, messages I’d hear too if only I didn’t keep wearing my colander on my head. Everybody is smiley in words no less than the pictures, and yet everything is about healing, as though the readership is entirely and profoundly injured in mysterious ways. Where’s the anger, the indignation, the fist punching the air, the urge to go outside the self, stop looking and sounding so stoned all the time, and get actively out there and into politics and do some fighting for a change? God.

Fire This Time is exactly the opposite: its rage is flung all over the walls in every direction like some madman in a cell with nothing but feces to make a point with. Consecutive articles (printed sideways, oddly and annoyingly) shout about Canada’s immoral role in Afghanistan, petitions signed by Canadians calling for immediate withdrawal, immigrants’ abused rights in the US, Six Nations’ abused rights in Ontario, native activist Frank Paul’s abused rights, and abuses by our military in Darfur. It’s a good hit of righteous anger cover to cover, and there is nothing soft about this left paper.

But you don’t have to go to distant exotic locales to find reasons to become angry and get actively into politics. The Pivot Post, news from the Pivot legal society, is chock-a-clock full of recent news about appalling landlords of low-income housing abusing tenants, and the City’s various departments abusing them further, with two-hour notices of evictions because of minor infractions of fire department codes. People by the dozens are being thrown out at the Lucky Lodge, the Pender Hotel, and the Astoria, and high-end “boutique hotels” are on the way in. I fear, after reading this, that Vancouver’s official thinking about solutions to the problem of poor people who are getting in the way of rich people wanting to make a bunch of money in the glow of the Olympics, is starting to take on shades of a Final Solution.