In my email box today are 45 announcements of up-coming rallies, talks, meetings, boycott actions and petitions. After that are 52 news items of interest to the progressive-minded, from LAPD assaults on marchers to Bush poll numbers hitting new lows to revealing YouTube alerts to new numbers on global warming to warnings that fruit juice is going to be called a drug, and on and on that goes. After that is about an equal number of government press releases and announcements from all levels, each one announcing something in happy terms that I find appalling.

I’m beginning to not care. There’s a guy across the street from me, I can see him from where I sit at my computer. He and his wife jump into their weighty Jeep thingy about ten times a day, sometimes for trips that last less than 10 minutes. I see them coming back with a pizza or Chinese food box. If they’re not back and forth with the infernal trips in the gas guzzler, they’re out there with the power mower, the power trimmer, the power blower, the power garden hose sidewalk washer, and every five minutes it’s something else firing up over there, and they just don’t seem to give a rat’s ass because I guess they’ve got the money.

Sure some small things change. We all use blue boxes just about all across Canada now to recycle our plastic and paper and we didn’t do that before. But then, how does all that recycling stack up against the pollution, the greenhouse gas emissions and the waste plastic and glass and paper our nation has dumped in the conduct of its illegal, uncalled for, and shameful war in Afghanistan?

They always say, fine, if you want to change things, get involved in politics. So I ran independently in Vancouver and got creamed. Next time, I ran with a party in what was an upcoming federal election, and look what happened there.

Doesn’t matter. When I review the history of change, I note that not a lot of it was ever initiated at the national Parliament, the provincial Legislature, or the civic Council Chambers. What those bodies do is react to changes that have already taken place in the society around them. They represent the bureaucracy to the people more often than the people to the bureaucracy, and as such, they resist as long as possible the changes that have already occurred around them, because it is inherent to the nature of bureaucracy to resist change. The only sense in which the elected officials represent those who elected them is when they try to explain to their electors why things are going to stay the way they are. And few of them ever even try to do that.

Change occurs outside. It doesn’t take place among cool-headed rational people sitting around a boardroom table discussing the minutiae of implications of what always turns out to be unacceptable change. It takes place in grand moments of sudden societal flipping triggered by radicals taking action.

Of course the mouthpieces of the corporations in the mainstream newspapers will condemn that process no matter what outcomes the radicals are trying to achieve. That is not the way to change things, they say, no, the way to change things is in the forums provided for the people, the Parliament, the Legislature, the Council Chambers, where, we already know, change won’t occur, which is the point of their suggestion.

But direct action by radicals is not new or outside accepted norms, it is merely leveling the playing field with those on the other side, the big corporations who ultimately rule the governing bureaucracies. They are the ones who are the true radicals. When Alcan threatens to shut down their aluminum plant in Kitimat when they are asked merely to negotiate with the town council over the use of the electricity the public allows them to pull from the river, is that not radical? Imagine if a group of activists threatened to utterly and for all time destroy the economic foundation of one of BC’s iconic towns, and threatened to forever destroy the jobs relied on by a thousand families to raise their kids, pay for their houses, and grow old happily. This is what Alcan threatens daily, and for that over-the-top radical direct action, they get the calm reassuring gentle pat on the back from government and grave nods of approval in the corporate press.

How about the Canadian Council of Chief Executive Officers who almost monthly issue threats to pull out all capital investments in Canadian enterprises if they are made to obey the legal tax laws of the country? They would sooner see the nation and all its men, women, and children thrust into the horror of depression at their own wicked hands than to actually pay the bills they agreed to pay when they registered their company in this country. How does the size and nature of that threat measure up against anything any citizen-radical in the nation’s history has ever suggested? And yet, the mainstream media only nod, and even provide rational, pragmatic arguments to back them up—which are usually 800-word versions of the one sentence that could say it all: better do what they say or else! Does Canada negotiate with terrorists? You bet we do, every day, at the behest and with the approval of the mainstream media.

Better not ask multinational corporations to report their profits honestly rather than siphon them off to the Cayman Islands. Why? Because if we ask them to do that one small, legally-bound favour, they will in one day utterly destroy our currency’s value so that we cannot import anything—food, clothes, energy: anything. With a currency plummeting in value, a cold-climate nation like Canada will be starved to death. Yet this is exactly what they threaten us with, and it’s reported in the cold, cunning voice of certainty virtually every day in the papers. “Canada’s currency structure uncertain in the face of tax discussions” is code for: “You people are starving to death if you think you’re going to make us pay what we owe.”

This behavior of corporate Canada is well beyond radical, it’s out-of-control psychopathic. And yet, when a “radical” citizen like Betty Krawczyk threatens to scratch one year’s profit margin for one single company that wants to tear out the ecological gem that was once the Eagleridge Bluffs, she goes to jail.

I say if corporate Canada can threaten to wipe out whole towns, plunge the country into depression, destroy our whole currency and taunt all 32 million of us with starvation, and get nothing but meals at the Four Seasons with our elected “representatives” and applause and accolades in our “free” press for it, then surely we can at least buy a sausage roll for, and mention in our “smudgy” independent newspapers, those radicals on our side who do no more than threaten occasional portions of profits hoarded by corporations by the application of the rules which those corporate bodies agreed to.

Here’s to all the radicals, potential and in actuality: May you garner the courage and backing to tear a page from corporate Canada’s playbook and at least threaten one tenth the havoc that they routinely threaten in the interests of the public good, where they do far worse in the interests of their own private profits.

We don’t need to send our army to Afghanistan to find and fight terrorists. We only need to send them marching down Howe and Bay Streets: there are plenty of terrorists behind every one of those plate-glass windows, if you care to read any number of their radical communiqués issued in the business press every day. Don’t be fooled by the business suits and clean-shaven faces, those are only jalabas and long beards in disguise.