Olympic Dreams

There are few things better than stepping of a plane, locking eyes with the one you love, and meeting in a kiss. ‘Nuff said.

But what’s really on my mind today is the announced intensive-monitoring of activists being justified by the 2010 Olympics. News reports today are raising alarm bells that Vancouver’s Olympic dreams might just provide an opportunity for activists from a range of movements to come together. It’s worth reading the coverage in full, so I won’t bother paraphrasing it all here. Rather, what I’m noticing today is how my own hopefulness grows as the security-types get worried.

It’s been a long time since Vancouver has seen a real challenge to social order, the last being the anti-globalization struggles of the mid to late 1990s. At that point, I was working within the labour movement, spending alot of energy and time in trying to get the mainstream left off its fear of the radicals and – if not to radicalize its own position - to understand the critical role played by anarchists and the so-called black bloc in forcing the state to display its violence nakedly, in opening public debate, and by extension in allowing social democrats to be heard at all.

It was an amazing time, a rekindling of broad-based social struggle, a concrete resistance to the mantra “there is no alternative” which had dominated popular culture for so long. But something happened, particularly after the attack on the World Trade Centre – that mass resistance collapsed, as many retreated into patriotism, many more moved towards anti-war organizing. And for the last decade, nothing has really brought together radicals, unions, churches, indigenous actvisits and so on and so in anything near the same way.

Enter the Olympics. I’ve had this conversation with numerous people over the last couple of years – does the Olympics represent an opportunity for a renewal of mass resistance? Seems to me it has the potential. Questions of land claims, ecological devestation, surveillance and security, public spending, labour and more, all come directly to the fore in the build-up to an event like this. What is more, the initial state- and self-censorship that arose in the wake of 9-11 has worn off in the last few years, opening a cultural space for various shapes of protest to emerge in ways they haven’t for some time.

Now, whether any of this will actually happen is a whole other question. But it does seem to me that resistance to 2010 is an incredible potential. Corporate and security forces certainly appear to be concerned, and that in itself should make us take a closer look at where the fault-lines are in the social order, and how these might be made yet more unstable in the Olympic build-up.

For my part, I’ll be with Meg tonight at Britannia community centre, for a public forum on whether 2010 will see a formal Olympic site housed in the eastside. But as much as the debate, I’ll be interested to check out the overall numbers of people and the various communities and activist group that turn up. Tonight might just provide a glimpse into where we are sitting on that line from potential to actual resistance, from isolated protest to generalized struggle. And, perhaps, too, tonight we’ll want to raise a toast to the cops and  security advisors out there who, by the front page of the Province,  reminded us all this morning that these Olympics are indeed a worthy target of our resistance.