Category Archives: peace

We Will Not Save The Environment Until…

With all the focus on the politics and math of mitigating climate change (which is getting exceptionally urgent, by the way), it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture. Last night Spacing Magazine launched their 10th issue, the “green issue.” Inside the front cover is the following, by Pier Giorgio DiCicco, Poet Laureate of the City of Toronto, edited from a speech at the Walk21 conference two months ago. It is, IMHO, profound.

After the many seductions, logical and visionary, have been played—I shall make a plea for the salvific aspect of the act of walking. Yes, salvific. Not just to save the environment, but to save ourselves, and not just by regarding the environment. We will not save the environment until we have found a reason for living together. Until we discover civic care in each other, until we restore the city to its definition as a place of unexpected intimacies, not just as a place of amenities, convenience, business, and entertainment, we will not have sustainability. For sustainability is about replacing an ethic of entitlement with an ethic of sufficiency. And sufficiency is what we find in each other. In an era that glorifies independence and even inter-dependence we are shy of admitting the awful truth: that is, we are dependent on each other, not by connectedness, but because we are one body breathing the same air. It is not cars that are the enemy of the pedestrian. The enemy is the absence of civic communion, the lack of empathic citizenship, our inability to see cohabitation as that place where we enjoy ourselves, by enjoying others. All human traffic is under siege, because it is becoming increasingly purposed, guarded, and negotiated. The body is not just a means of locomotion. It is our chief means of restoring a city to its raison d’être, its purpose. And that purpose is civil encounter.

But civic trust has been corroded. Our cities are becoming disinhabited, even when the streets are safe and landscaped; gentrified neighbourhoods are no more interactive than the brownfields and cloverleafs they replaced. The problem is not, fundamentally, to get people to slow down, or to move without being toxic to their environment. The problem is to make people aware that anonymity is as toxic to the ecology of heart as hydrocarbons are toxic to the atmosphere. The problem is how to restore intimacy, curiosity, trust, and play into the happenstance encounter of citizens, in an era when the happenstance and the unpredictable are a threat.

When all the cars will have been taxed or tolled on their way to the cities, when bike paths and parks will have reconfigured our neighbourhoods, when safe and cleaner transportation has cut emissions, a fundamental question will remain. Is the safe city, the sanitized city, the sustainable city, the same as the livable city? If all we want is clean and well-designed cities, it will likely come to pass. But in the long run, to save the environment means that we will want to save the environment not just for ourselves, but for each other. And to reverence each other means that we will have to discover each other.

I wonder if any of the delegates and observers to Bali channeled Dr. Eleanor Arroway on arrival, saying “they should have sent a poet.”

Suicide Bombings A Good Sign: Oda

The Harper cabinet minister who removed “equality” from the mandate of Status of Women Canada, arguing that that would improve women’s equality, today went further down the rabbit hole:

One of the cabinet ministers visiting Afghanistan to meet with that country’s leadership and Canadian troops says that roadside and suicide bombings in Kabul indicate that the situation is improving in the country.

According to the Canadian Press, International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda went before skeptical Afghan journalists and said roadside and suicide bombings indicate that the insurgents have made a shift in tactics. She said that shows the success of the NATO mission.

I wonder, if the insurgents get their hands on a dirty bomb or worse, will Oda continue to take that as a positive indicator of progress?

Gulf War Song

Yesterday evening, Tuesday, September 11th 2007, my brother Alex, my buddy Steve and I drove up to Barrie to play a show for Georgian College students at their campus bar, The Last Class, where Steve and I performed weekly for several years. At the end of our three-hour set, thinking about the thousands who lost their lives six years ago and the projected one million-plus who have lost their lives since in Afghanistan and Iraq, we spontaneously decided to close by singing Gulf War Song by David Matheson of Moxy Fruvous. I was pleasantly surprised to see more than one person in the audience singing along. The song was first recorded in 1992 by the Thornhill, Ontario-based band, but remains powerful, moving, and relevant. The below video is provided primarily for the audio–the images are hit and miss, IMO.

We got a call to write a song about the war in the Gulf
But we shouldn’t hurt anyone’s feelings
So we tried, then gave up, ’cause there was no such song
But the trying was very revealing
What makes a person so poisonous righteous
That they’d think less of anyone who just disagreed?
She’s just a pacifist, he’s just a patriot
If I said you were crazy, would you have to fight me?

Fighters for liberty, fighters for power
Fighters for longer turns in the shower
Don’t tell me I can’t fight, ’cause I’ll punch out your lights
And history seems to agree that I would fight you for me

So we read and we watched all the specially selected news
And we learned so much more ’bout the good guys
Won’t you stand by the flag? Was the question unasked
Won’t you join in and fight with the allies?
What could we say…we’re only 25 years old?
With 25 sweet summers, and hot fires in the cold
This kind of life makes that violence unthinkable
We’d like to play hockey, have kids and grow old

Fighters for Texaco, fighters for power
Fighters for longer turns in the shower
Don’t tell me I can’t fight ’cause I’ll punch out your lights
And history seems to agree that I would fight you for me
That us would fight them for we

He’s just a peacenik and she’s just a warhawk
That’s where the beach was, that’s where the sea
What could we say…we’re only 25 years old?
And history seems to agree
that I would fight you for me
That us would fight them for we

Is that how it always will be?