Painting History

So, class today brought up some fascinating ideas, the most relevant of which I found to be 'history'. Looking at it from the concept side of the equation, and from our extensive discussion, it does essentially define subjectivity. I think it was Churchill who said 'History is written by the victors', and that definitely highlights an extremely important consideration when assessing any historical narrative or data; the power of interpretation, and selective omission, is given solely to the writer. That being said, someone has to record what happens, and that someone is going to be human, usually. So from the outset its a flawed process, meaning that, past ensuring no overly malicious or slanderous motives on the part of the author, minor issues of emotionality and inconsistencies should be a moot point. Linda Goyette goes to great pains to cover every facet of D'edmontonia, not just the shiny ones, and her slight biases did nothing to contract from my total immersion into the stories and experiences. I believe that's called 'making history come alive', but thats a rather extreme way of throwing it down. I'll just say I liked it.

Who Protests Anymore?

So, reading the article about 'the streets as democracy', a question took root in my mind, foreign amongst all the movie highlights and dead baby jokes. What does it take to get a person of our generation to leave their house/apartment/box and actually take to the streets? A lifetime of guaranteed security, food, and cold, pseudo-reality entertainment, for the large majority anyways, has left us inured and apathetic to global or local issues; whatever primal protest urges that might still surface are satisfied neatly by joining a facebook cause, chipping in a couple dollars, or, in extreme cases, venting about it in one's blog. To take a recent example, Restricted Access garnered 400 attendants out of a student body of over 35 000, and maybe 50 of those were people like myself who only showed up because it was mandatory in order to get points for a Lister tower competition. Though perhaps thats more an indicator of the strength of that particular cause, what will we do when a real, dire, nation-building or crisis cause presents itself? The hunger rally of '32 related to us in class seems distant, and Edmonton hasn't seen anything like the Depression since, well, the Depression. Protests are always represented as being started from a spark, a catalyst, of some sort; one must also realize fuel, such as long-felt communist oppression or widespread shortages, is a far more necessary ingredient to the cake of protest. In the immortal words of Tyler Durden, 'our generation has no great war, no great depression. No purpose, no place'. Maybe thats something to be proud of...but humanity defines itself in adversity, and we, specifically Edmontonians, have no adversity to speak of. Except, perhaps, the possibility of the Oilers not making playoffs.

Does North America have too much space? yes, yes it does.

After absorbing that Rebecca Solnit excerpt, I started thinking. Quite obviously, she had a deep infatuation with Italian cities, and the pedestrian wonders they've managed to evolve, but more than that, she'd fallen in love with the community that had to grow up in such circumstances; every packed street forced interaction with all elements of society, no matter how unscrupulous or arrogant. North Americans building cities grew up inside a different paradigm, with the dominant theme being to fill space, settle the west, claim new land, etc etc, and we live in the remnants of that expansionist dream, perhaps even its carcass; people are constantly afraid of being stuck 'between' places, on a stretch of highway between one's home and Walmart for example, and what results is not a continuous spectrum of changing scenery and people, but a discrete set of destinations one achieves in a day, with a minimum of human interaction, usually from the safety of a personal motor chaffeur. Even in suburbia, people are seen as potential sources of harm, instead of feeling the shared camaraderie of forced neighbors. When I went to Italy (yeah, you can feel the irrelevant personal epiphany coming... wait for it...) I was struck by the same elements; cars were treated like aliens intruding on a pedestrian's world, not the other way around, and its far enough back in my memory so that I remember people as being more polite/courteous than your average Edmonton SUV owner. A city that had walking as the primary mode of transport is going to feel more personal and less cold than one from the post-Ford age; even streets in the same city from the two different periods prove it (walk down Whyte and then walk down the Whitemud). Shared experience versus hermetically-sealed vehicular isolation. But where does this lead to? As the world becomes increasingly smaller, and people/dwellings/amenities start to stack up Blade Runner-style, care must be taken to foster that community feel, or else before we know it, its pre-Guiliani New York all over the globe, with everyone fending only for themselves.