Close to Home

During the G20, our city was host to intense confrontations and brutality. As the weekend progressed, we all witnessed a shift of focus from the organized dissent against the G20 summit, and the economic irresponsibility of world leaders, to a stand-off between police and Toronto citizens. Thousands of police were bussed in from neighbouring towns to regulate protests and protect the summit. Similarly, protesters from cities all over Canada came to confront the powers-that-be and stand in solidarity with the exploited and the oppressed. It seems as though this conflict was predestined.

In the aftermath of these events, as stories of wrongdoing being to surface, profound questions are being raised about equality, civil rights, and our current institutions of justice. It seems that the injustices of the G20 were made tangible on a local level for all of us here in Toronto. We were faced with the same systematic dehumanization, fear-mongering, and stark hostility as occurs on a grander scale due to the exploitative policies of globalization, industrialization, open market economics bolstered by the G20 players.

What has this experience granted us? In some ways, it felt as though the shift in focus from the G20 summit to the politics of police vs. protester, was a defeat for those whose purpose and presence at the initial protests was to interrogate and expose the intentions and actions of the G20. The confrontations also provoked questions concerning the efficacy of certain forms of activism; what is resistance, and does it merely support that which it seeks to confront? Does confronting this system merely yield greater trauma, unconsciousness, alienation, and suffering?

In some ways, the G20 fiasco catalyzed an urgent revelation for Torontonians, and anyone else in the world who was watching responsible media coverage of the events.

It appears that the instances of police brutality and the outrageous violation of basic principles of human rights helped to mobilize and motivate activism and community dissent at a local level more successfully than the global irresponsibility of the world leaders involved in the G20 did during the actual Summit protests. The palpable sense of injustice and violation in our own back yard brought out citizens who were otherwise unconcerned or uninvolved with the summit protests.

I would argue that local action and community based work is the only way to solve the greater and seemingly insurmountable problems of the global system. As the issues of the macrocosm spiral down into the sphere of our own small communities and homes, we must radiate the change from our communities outward. Perhaps, as well, that change will come without an active opposition of systems of injustice and abuse—which seemingly perpetuate the power of those systems—but in a redefinition, or a turning away from those systems entirely, and towards another system altogether.

In a similar way, I would argue that vegetarianism isn’t a resistance movement, but rather an active withdrawal from the dominant food paradigm. Can we apply this method to our choices and conduct as political entities by choosing to no longer participate?

To quote a former American soldier who recently spoke on the nature of war: “there will only be a war if soldiers are willing to fight.”