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Most casualties in the battle of the voices will be invisible, even to the combatants. It is only pieces of us that die: our dignity, integrity. Factions coalesce together around coercion, hero worshiping star fuckers and propagandists. Intimidators normalize rotted relationships, fostering corruption, bulldozing the places that we really live.
No Such Thing as Non-Violence
It is a truism that violence is pervasive and endemic in our society. But violence is deeper than wars, crime and videogames. Violence is at the core of many of our relationships, and it is in the systems of organization in our communities. It defines our economy and our understandings of justice. Violence is the basic organizational structure of our society. Most of the violence in our lives is experienced as invisible. We only recognize certain kinds of violence.
Here Be Pirates
There is a story that I have been told that has guided much of my thinking and actions over the past few years. It is a true story. It is a story about our history, about us. It goes something like this.
HALT the Dump
It was in early December that I first got the call from a friend of mine. It was from a Toronto Lawyer; one who has devoted herself to anti-oppression legal system-based activism, and who is also the primary legal advisor for the local activist group—AW@L—that I am a member of. Within a few days of that phone call, a car full of Laurier students was on the road out of Waterloo towards Cayuga at 4:30 on a Monday morning.
When Environmental Destruction Equals Cultural Genocide: The Clearcutting of Grassy Narrows
I spent this past summer in the Grassy Narrows First Nation community in Northwestern Ontario. I went there as part of a joint internship program, working for Forest Ethics and the Rainforest Action Network (RAN). We were there to work with grassroots activists in the community to help combat the corporate onslaught of clear-cut logging that is destroying the environment of their territory.
Israel and Palestine: Both Sides of the Fence
I’ve been to Israel. I have family there. One of the brothers is a peace activist in Jerusalem. The other lives in a large West Bank settlement. He has a dead son, a victim of the conflict. He was killed in uniform, in a raid on a Palestinian home -hardly an innocent victim. My last [...]
Cartoons & Fences
As this article is being written, late in reading week, riots continue on a daily basis in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, India and elsewhere. This ongoing furor has arisen from the printing of cartoons in some newspapers. Twelve cartoons were first printed on September 30, 2005 in a Danish paper. Over the couple of months that [...]
It’s About Time We Make Poverty History
By the time people are reading this article, Make Poverty History Day will be nearly a month behind us. But obviously, the problem of poverty will not. Many times I have been asked how a single day of ‘awareness’ was supposed to make a difference towards such an overwhelming situation. Some people have gone so far as to call the organizers of the campaign hypocrites.
Canada’s No Utopia Either
In this grand country of ours we tend to define ourselves largely based on our differences from the cultural behemoth to the south. But in the last four years, since the rise to power of the Bush/Cheney administration, something has changed. We don’t just see ourselves as different and better, but we seem to hate [...]
