I’m on the side that seeks to benefit the most people in the least invasive way possible. This park reno isn’t about any of the things you are talking about. It’s actually not a complex issue at all. It’s about restoring the decaying infrastructure of a public space. That’s it. There is not hidden agenda here. There is not secret cabal of home-owners wringing their hands in greed.

The only people most locals want to see pushed out of this park (if anyone) are drug dealers, and those who behave in a violent or intimidating manner. That’s it. And I stand by that. This stuff has no place in a public park. These individuals are of course welcome to use the park like everybody else, but they have to leave their business and attitudes elsewhere. If you want to call that fascist, go nuts. To argue that drug dealing in parks is okay, is just extreme left goofiness, and it’s no more rational than far right goofiness.

The other issues you mention, and they are very serious, are not the domain of the Vancouver Parks Board. The people who are wasting their time fighting new benches would be better occupied calling on the city to restart it’s funding of housing co-ops, and trying to figure out a way to get more housing into the rental market. (Incentives, or penalties to investors who are happy to leave their condos empty).

What’s this all about, really, huh ? History ? The history of human relations hasn’t really changed much: capitalist vs. communist or whatever euphemism you choose. Visible (street people) vs, invisible (anyone who has a job is rich to someone lying in the gutter), all the way up to the top) crime.Why do the police, who are better informed than I am, target the poor many ask ? They are plainly visible, that’s why. And, they are repugnant to the State’s sensibilities, though the rich often claim to represent them. How can anyone “represent” anyone else anymore. You see why people don’t trust each other these days. They have lost their compassion in this often heartless, hopeless,
devastatingly contradictory global village, from Commercial Drive, to Toronto, the streets of any American city to Jerusalem,the woods where skinheads, bikers, and evangelists, eco-environmentalists and W.H.Y. propagate. The sheer numbers of applicants or welfare claims never hit “us”,especially the Darwinian fit entrepreneurs in Point Grey, Langley or West Vancouver, ie. the remaining State at this moment. (and even a cursory analysis of criminological research, ie.socio-economic, political economic,psychological,commercial,etc. (try S.F.U.’s school of criminology website for example)will shed light on the need for meta analysis of interdisciplinary studies, which any computer ( a model for man of course)is well capable of doing these days. The web is the cake, and “we” (wishful thinking on my part I guess. Blame my sister)are the misled bakers, unless we read everything we can get our hands on, which is what any decent politician will do, and have the scholastic tools,critical analysis, to unmask the veneer of propriety behind often misinformed, spin-doctored lies about political-economic reality. Being all things to all people is, for the State, often an impossible task during the age of 1 second video/sound bytes, and as the history of both good and bad,ie, warfare and peace,has no doubt instructed us all,we assume our sides according to our material circumstances (Marx simplistic yet tasty basic theory, that materiality determines ideology, the foundation for the N.D.P. and social democratic movements world wide. As opposed to Hegel’s claim that it is the other way around (tell that to Bill Gates or VanderZalm))So just accept everyone’s interpretation of reality,don’t go nuts doing it, and educate yourselves about this moment in world history. The time, the moment,praxis,is finally here ! So, the shadows become lucid, crisp, the contradictions pop
up like perogies in a vat of boiling water, and Tolle’s critique of ego alters our collective consciousness so suddenly, that only the esoteric few are capable of grasping it. Somewhat like the top and bottom 5 % on the bell curve, except the Internet has negated the validity and reliability of such ancient rituals, and has uncovered a basic flaw in the State’s often formal assumptions. The Bell curve was created using a mainly white middle class
random sample, and as we all know, they are a world-wide minority.
In fact, substantively, the poor really make up about 70% of B.C.’s population when official and unofficial stats are considered. Quite a huge constituency for an opportunist like me. (Google my name and u will see that I presented a brief to the Human Rights Commission’s Evelyn Wu about 20 years ago, based on the B.C. government’s own stats alone !)
The moment has come for Manchurian candidates everywhere. Some will shoot bullets, others words. The Internet, like any fairly new C.I.A. invention, cxan be used for devastation like 911, or to get Barack Obama elected. People in general are better educated, informed and connected as a result of it, and of course, if you think about B.F. Skinner, Watson, Wundt (obscure cognitive psychologist who mapped the brain in the 19th century)(Read the bible, or Mein Kempf, the Torah, Mohammed’s Koran, or W.H.Y.. It doesn’t really matter, does it ? It all comes down to one thing, as I listen to the sirens outside while I type comfortably,securely, from the bastion of my subsidized enclave, having walked the good earth and the bad, felt the heat and cold, witnessed first-hand the horrors of subjection, the alienation of being a “Jew” on the street. Whose side are u on ?

Stephen Blumstein

Hardly a way to build community.

In a nutshell, we just want everybody to relax and get along in a nice new park. The 8 months shutdown blows, but it hits everyone pretty much equally. This whole stink is just so typically Commercial Drive that normally we would ignore it, but we use the park every day, AND I was super tired the night they kept me up till 3 AM, so I thought what the hell. Time to tell these guys where to step off, and cram some rational thought into their heads.

To be fair, the revelers did not vandalize the kid’s equipment. More like some fat-assed drunk hipster from Main Street sat in the swing and ripped it apart. But they did leave trash everywhere, rip off the garbage cans, and vandalize the already nasty washrooms, so basically, in 14 years of renting near the park, this was the worst I’d seen it, pretty stupid for a group that is suppose to be the Defenders of Grandview.

I think you’ve nailed it when you say this isn’t about gentrification. That’s been happening for years, and the park reno isn’t likely to make much of a difference in property values. You could just pave the thing and people would still have bidding wars to live there. We make good money by Canadian standards, but we’ve been priced out of the market, and the cozy dive we call home and have rented for 14 years is about to be pulled out from under us, renovated and broken up into suites, so I get people feeling pissed off.

My wife has suggested that this isn’t about new benches and grass, or even the poor, so much as a feeling of helplessness in a city gone development crazy. The fact that promises keep being made and broken has driven people a little nuts, so it’s understandable that the less rational are unable to reason things out.

I have no idea what we hope to achieve with the group (now up to 25, woot!) other than to say that yes, we can be inclusive, and yes, we can have a nice new park, and we’re pushing for a few changes to the plans, namely that a stage be added at some point. The park hosts enough events, both legitimate and “illegitimate, that it makes sense.

Hopefully at some point everybody pulls their heads out of their collective asses, and chills out. Far nicer that way.