Countdown City

The city feels like it's under some laid-back west coast version of martial law as the 2010 Winter Olympic games are about to descend on us. The downtown core is a maze of makeshift road barriers manned by police and security personnel, directing traffic and eyeing any suspicious persons. It is a bit of an unsettling addition to the landscape. I feel so leaden about it all. I am not able to summon enthusiasm for this giant spectacle that will thrust this usually low-key backwater of a city into the harsh spotlight of international media attention. These games have been surrounded by controversy from the day that they won a slim majority of support by Vancouverites in a plebiscite. It has been a nonstop build-up since then with construction projects sprouting up everywhere inconveniencing many and forcing nearby businesses to close down. It has sponged up massive public expenses with a spiralling deficit that has appeared to many as a frivolous extravagance in a city that boasts one of the most addicted and transient neighbourhoods in North America.
Others have blamed the provincial government here for ignoring the plight of the marginalized while pouring money into a "corporate event for the world's elite." The games' critics point to cuts in healthcare and education and other high priorities. The games are seen as an untenable white elephant that will cripple the host city with debt for the next two decades. No good can come of this and any attempt to argue on behalf of the games' merits is met with a shrill chorus of rebuke by the fervently partisan anti-Olympics crowd.
Yet, despite all of this, I am of two minds about the games. I have learned how to keep silent around friends who are vocally anti-Olympics because these same people are well-briefed with facts and figures that they can recite at will. They are prepared to back up their rhetoric with sources -- flimsy and biased sources -- but sources nonetheless. I am not inclined to look at the Olympics through a limited "either/or" ideological lens however. My feeling about this all is that the verdict is out on the 2010 games and that their long-term legacy is likely to prove mostly positive, this won't placate the games' self-satisfied critics, however, who can point to the immediately measureable costs and adverse impacts that the games have imposed on the city and the province. The games are too omnipresent and they resonate far too wide to simply categorize.
There is a sizeable, organized and vocal activisit community in Vancouver that is poised to jump at every occasion in which an injustice whether real or perceived might surface. They have seized the Olympics as a catalyst in which they can direct all of their energies and resentments. These mostly professionally-unemployed malcontents never bother to factor in that the drastic budget cuts to healthcare and education in the early decade were more a result of a neo-liberal government's blueprint and that these cuts would have been the case with or without the games coming to town, it is impossible to convince those who I would describe as the "knee-jerk" left, of the error in their assumptions. They are just as extreme and uncompromising as their counterparts on the right -- untainted by the truth and impervious to contradictory logic.
However, I've learned that to raise a dissenting voice is not to be heard among this zealous, chanting congregation in the church of contrarianism. I have to admit that I feel reluctant to reveal my political differences in their company because their groupthink mentality is so tight and so insecure that it excommunicates anyone who doesn't properly get with the party line. I've learned to bite my tongue and contain my opinions when I hear yet another friend of mine spout "Olympics = bad."
Any astute observer can agree that Vanoc (the organizing committee for the 2010 games) has been overly protective of the Olympic copywright and has been a regulatory bully. It's easy to dislike Vanoc as a governing entity. I dislike its strongarm tactics and its attempts to micro-manage the spirit of this event. I even dislike our provincial government more for their mean-spirited policies and their whoring to big business. Critics of the games are right to point out the exorbitant pricetag for all this has resulted in rent gouging as Vancouver's housing market has heated up in recent years -- but i would argue that this is also not exclusively the games' fault. Critics are right to complain about the mass inconveniences and gridlock that the games will cause, I cycle to work every day on my bicycle and I have to take a much more circuitious route, that wouldn't be so bad if cyclists weren't sharing the sidewalk with pedestrians.
There has been mismanagement and duplicity in this and to top it all off, we are experiencing one of the warmest winters on record here. Just this morning I heard robins singing. The other day as I was riding home, I had to shed layers of clothing because I was getting very toasty in balmy 12 degrees weather under a pale yellow sun and a feeling that spring was in the air. It's almost impossible to snap into a winter Olympics fever when it's plus-10 and you are leaving your winter clothes at home every morning.
With all this said, I am going to step up and make a case for why I think the games ultimately is a good thing, however.
On the surface, the Olympics celebrates the power and beauty of the perfectly conditioned human body and the spirit of peaceful competition among nations. But more importantly, it reflects the highest values in our society -- self-reliance, discipline, pride, hope -- in a word -- excellence. All of these values have fallen far out of fashion in the last 40 years and are mistakenly conflated with "fascist ideals"-- when they were in fact, just as much the guiding values of the generation that defeated fascism. The spoiled boomer children of that generation, of course were willfully blind to this in their orgiastic rush to shed their garments of repression and with them, any other inconvenient obstacles to their instant gratification ethos. Naturally, all of us who've come after have inherited the boomer frame of reference and the social order of the present has been so enfeebled by officially sanctioned mediocrity and learned helplessness over the forces of striving and self-sacrifice, that no sector of society is immune from the scourge of the lowered bar it seems. This slackening trend of the western world with all of its apologists -- academics, journalists, activist judges -- a generation bred and trained in culturally-correct revisionism, is the entrenched status quo. Optimists might claim that there's nothing to despair about here and that this cultural warfare reflects the wonderfully diverse and fluid nature of the west, where currents rub up against each other and that the dialectical tension is healthy. Can these same optimists make the same defense for disintegration of values, the decline of prosperity and political apathy? Are they indicators of a healthy and vibrant liberal democracy?
Radicalism used to have very real enemies, yet now radical opposition to authority looks increasingly more desperate and destructive and protesting mobs resemble sophomoric, attention-craving ingrates who, lacking any real prospects thanks to their selfish parents, resort to a nihilistic lashing-out at all symbols of authority. The Olympics serve as a useful target for frustrations by those who are quick to ignore the universal message of self-betterment that the games represents in favour of cynically focusing on its worst aspects.
It is presumptuous to declare the 2010 games to be either "all good or all bad" -- they are simply too interwoven into our community now and they represent an investment that will yield a tangible legacy. Will the games pay for themselves? Probably not in the immediate term and I rank among those skeptics, - however, I think this will have long term benefits for this city although it may not be to my liking or to that of the anti-2010 protesters who see progress in a narrow light.