For the best part of two months I have been camping in the hills of Bonshaw. Just before I came out, police raided the hemlock grove on Crawford’s Stream (down the hill from camp) and, for reasons I couldn’t begin to understand then, the news enraged me so much I spent the evening writing inarticulate, profane and insulting emails to MLAs. Inarticulate because I had not been following Plan B (neither spin nor protests) and profane and insulting because that was the depth of my rage.
The next day I went to a rally and began an intense learning curve about the goings on behind this Plan B road. (I’ll go into what I’m learning in future posts, but this one is the story of how I got here.) When I got home, I heard a wise woman, being interviewed about what it had been like to have been arrested in the grove, say she couldn’t think of what she should do when the cops came, so she just sat down. Three days later I came to camp so those who had been in the hemlocks could go home to regroup. I was a protester in the ‘60s and ‘70s and well remember the profound feelings of loss and grief at discovering police lie and broken promises don’t count in politics. I sat down when I arrived and here I am, still sitting.
I know now why I was so very angry, and it goes way beyond doing penance for my Liberal vote. I have simply had enough of what passes for democracy in this once proud province, and nation, for that matter. I am tired of the rich getting richer while the number of poor grow and have less and less say in services and ‘things’ they pay for. I am tired of the destruction of this earth in the name of greed and profit, of and for the few who feel a sense of entitlement they have no right to. I have lived more than 60 years on this good earth and it pisses me off that we are leaving nothing but desecration and ruin for our children and our children’s children. I have had enough of a lot of things and I can’t think of anything to do but sit.
To some I am a fool; to others a hero. I respectfully dispute both.
It may seem foolish to leave a comfortable seniors’apartment complex for a trailer in the woods, but I am neither starving nor freezing and I am surrounded by wonderfully intelligent caring people who educate, inspire and support me. That is anything but foolish.
I do not see myself as a hero because sitting here is not really action at all. It’s just sitting. The heroes are the ones who went through the betrayal of the raid in the grove, while our pompous Premier extolled his own virtues on CBC radio. Heroes are those who have faced death in their fight for the freedoms we so blithely give up. I am a protester, an old girl sitting on a hill, watching as some work so others can collect their ‘due.’ And, I’m proud to say, I’ve gotten more fed up and shed hardly a tear as I watch paradise bulldozed in preparation for pavement. All I can think to do is sit and write.
Common sense is so uncommon it’s damn near a super-power
