I originally posted this last Fall, 2010. It was in the thread "why the revolution will not be tweeted" (thanks to Barry Randall for resuscitating it). I think it is relevant to the current thread.
------------------------------------- The growth of social movements requires a positive image of the future. Something that is lacking today. There is much finger pointing at what can be done here and there but there is no over arching image of what is worth working for. The past was about growth is good. When the economy stalled the positive image was to get the economy growing. It was about getting a job and staying with one company. It was about settling down, having a family etc. etc. Now we realize that growth uses resources, pollutes, leads to global warming, etc. Now working for one firm is long gone, as are pensions, as is the stability that comes from family formation. There is nostalgia for some aspects of the past but dread for most aspects of the future. We seem to be stuck between a past that brought us here but may not bring us further and a future which is wrought with uncertainty and, at times, images of danger. Society is in a hyper self conscious state and while there is much criticism there is (aside from some fundamentalists on the right and the left) little in the way of a positive image of the future about which coalitions can be built. arthur From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick Sent: Friday, June 17, 2011 2:17 PM To: [email protected]; [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Musing on the Vancouver Stanley Cup riot The area in which the rioting took place is still vaguely familiar. It was 1949 or '50. I had a small, cheap downtown room on Homer Street. I was going to become the world's greatest artist. Seventeen or eighteen at the time, I'd dropped out of high school, spent fourteen months working in a sawmill to put some money together, and registered at the Vancouver School of Art (now the Emily Carr School). I stayed for a year, long enough to learn that there were plenty of other kids more equipped to become the world's greatest artist than I was. When I now look back, my greatest accomplishment was having a ten minute conversation with Lauren Harris, who came to visit us at the school. If there had been a Stanley Cup riot at the time, would I have joined in? Well, there was no riot. There couldn't have been. I and all of the kids I knew felt a part of Vancouver. It was our city; ours to live in; ours to enjoy and keep in good shape. I think that young people generally felt that way at the time. Move on to 1957. I had just graduated from the Faculty of Commerce at UBC with an economics degree. I had several firm job offers; even the dumbest kid in the class had a job offer or two. The world was ours to make the best of. Would we have taken part in a riot? No, why would we? There was no point. Fast forward to the present. Jobs are much harder to get now than they were back in the 1950s. Many young and not so young people are out on the street no longer looking for jobs because they just aren't there. Universities are packed with young people because they have nowhere else to go and because they hope a degree will help them get a job when they graduate - if they can afford to graduate and if the jobs are there. The world that I felt so good about back in the 1950s because it was my world and so full of promise has now become, as Barbara Ehrenreich puts it, their world - a world which young people feel they have no real part in and no control over. It doesn't belong to them, it belongs to government or the corporate world or to someone you can't reach, touch or control. Whoever is in charge can put a fence around themselves and keep you out, as was done in Toronto at the G20 summit. And if you try to do something about it, you can be sure the cops will be there. This doesn't excuse the kind of behavior we saw in Vancouver, but it may in part explain it. If I were a young person in Vancouver in the world of now would I not jump up and down when I saw a cop car in flames? Might I not want to break a window? I simply don't know, but I do know that I'm not going to be too hardheaded about what happened in Vancouver on Wednesday night. Ed
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