I’m genuinely stumped about what to write about this morning. Not that I’m hurting for subject matter, what with the ongoing shitshow in Hamilton and this morning’s developments out front of City Hall, but that’s actually part of the problem: There’s so much going on. I’m having trouble staying on top of it all, even if I’ve been following it much more closely than most. So I’m going to take a step back and write about… well, me, for a change.
You see, I was challenged, earlier this week, by a pissed-off Yellow Vester who demanded to know why anyone should give a shit about my opinion.
Despite being asked by an alt-right moron, that is actually a fair question. I call this blog “The Hungover Pundit“, and while I’ve manifestly earned the appellation “hungover” why should anyone put any weight to my claim of being a pundit? Where am I coming from that on my opinion should carry any weight whatsoever?
Twenty years of activism and progressive political agitation, that’s where. I’m an activist, and I’ve been an activist for half my life.
The first political action I ever took part in was a street march in Toronto way back in the autumn of 2000. It was organized by the Canadian Federation of Students to protest the Mike Harris government’s attack on post-secondary education; I think I might still have one of the pins in a drawer somewhere. It was a pretty straightforward CFS demonstration — thousands of students bused in from colleges and universities across the province, unload at Ryerson and then march to Queens Park, filling up the lawn and waving our professionally-printed signs. Aside from some media coverage, I doubt very much it accomplished anything; Harris once notoriously stated that every blade of grass at Queens Park could be trampled by protesters and he wouldn’t change course.
(Oh, for the carefree and halcyon days of Mike Harris in this Doug Ford world.)
The next action I was involved with — somewhat peripherally — were the protests around the closures of two of Trent University’s academic colleges. These peaked in the infamous “Trent Eight” arrests of a group of women occupying administrative offices and subsequent police brutality, including unwarranted strip-searches of the female activists by male officers that were later ruled as cruel and punitive.
Shortly thereafter, I joined Trent U’s hundreds-strong contingent of students heading to the protests around the FTAA summit in Quebec City. That weekend, and I say this without hyperbole, changed the course of my entire life. I went, in the space of 72 hours, from a sheltered middle-class white kid from rural Ontario who genuinely believed that his country could be convinced to do the right thing to a tear-gas soaked and heavily traumatized radical who finally understood on a gut level what Ursula K LeGuin once wrote: The State recognizes no coinage but power, and it issues the coins itself.
Having a cop meet your eye and grin before he tries to shatter your skull with a ballistic teargas canister is a genuinely cathartic experience.
And after that there was no turning back. For the next seven years I was a street medic and a black bloc activist, mostly involved with antipoverty and global justice protests. It became my entire life: If there was a big protest in Ontario during the first decade of this century, then chances are pretty good that I was there. Mind you, I couldn’t run the rest of my life worth a damn but I was hell on wheels with a bandana and a first aid kit. I once did the math and between 2000 and 2008, I was involved with thirty seven major direct actions, demonstrations and occupations; I think it averages out to something like one every ten weeks, which is as often as normal people get haircuts. That includes the time spent recuperating after I was knocked down by a hit-and-run driver while acting as a street medic during a Peterborough squat.
That wasn’t the only time I got hurt, although it was by far the worst: broken bones, a concussion and a long-term inflammation to my knee that would eventually require surgery and physiotherapy. Gas and pepper spray at Quebec and Ottawa; burns on my hands from picking up an active tear-gas canister; getting hit with a flashbang at Montebello; frostbite on Parliament Hill (a Valentine’s Day protest in support of Marriage Equality was great symbolism, but it was still mid-February in Ottawa); bruises, cuts, scrapes, falls, blows, barbed wire and turned ankles… they all left their mark. The romance of being a revolutionary can carry you through a lot when you’re young and strong and righteous, but the scars on your brain and body add up.
So eventually, all as all good things do, that part of my life came to an end: one morning in May of of 2008 I woke up on the front lawn of Queens’ Park. I was acting as a street medic in support of the Ardoch Algonquin and Shabot Obaadijiwan Algonquin’s protest against a proposed uranium mine in their unceded territory near Sharbot Lake Ontario. I was about to turn thirty and I’d been sleeping rough during the action; it was a cold, overcast, windy morning and every bone I’d ever broken, every bruise, every scar, just ached like a motherfucker. As cliché as it sounds, I clearly remember saying to myself “I am getting too old for this.”
And I was.
That kind of in-your-face, confrontational street activism is definitely a lifestyle for the young, but it’s hard as hell to sustain it and as every middle-aged athlete can tell you, bouncing back from every injury gets harder and harder.
In the spring of 2008 I so broke I could barely afford cigarettes, in the terminal throes of a seriously unhealthy romantic relationship, stuck in a precarious living situation, and making a last-ditch effort to finally drag my degree across the finish line. When I got home from that action, I took some time and made some decisions, and one of those decisions was to step back from being a street medic and doing those kinds of direct actions.
A year later, living in my own apartment, a non-smoker and a university graduate, dating the person who I would eventually marry, I reached another important milestone in my life: For the first time, I signed a cheque donating money to a cause I believed in. As milestones go, that one might not seem important but it was to me, marking the transition from being a frontline activist to being a supporter.
That was ten years ago. My partner and I would move in together, get married, get a house; I worked a number of jobs with varying levels of suck; we adopted a couple of dogs; we moved across the province and got another house; basically, my thirties happened. I kept signing cheques, as and when, but like many of us in the Obama years I thought my activist days were behind me… aside from an occasional very tame demonstration standing around holding signs. I had become the white, middle-class armchair activist that I’d regarded back in my “wild days” with a sort of bemused contempt, even as I’d participated in actions dependent on their donations.
Then came the Trump administration, slouching towards the White House to be born.
Like everyone else with a conscience, a brain and a soul, I was absolutely devastated when Trump was elected. And so, like an estimated 59,999 others, I attended the Toronto Women’s March in January of 2017… with my spouse, which was a first for me.
That was the catalyst. After almost a decade off the streets, was back in the activist game again.
I’ve recently reached out to the local activist and anarchist community (and I never stopped being either, even during the quieter years of my thirties) and rejoined the same radical syndicalist union I belonged to back in my twenties, the venerable Industrial Workers of the World. (My re-entry to the Wobblies was through the IWW’s Freelance Journalists Union, and if you’re a freelancer, writer blogger or otherwise a content creator, join the IWW-FJU. It’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.)
More I’ve gotten involved in anti-fascist resistance in Hamilton/Niagara (as has been detailed in this blog) and I’m feeling incredibly good about it: I spent a decade learning these skills, and a decade letting them languish. Getting back in the saddle and sharing the benefit of my experience is good… and most importantly I have an understanding of my own privilege and influence in ways that I didn’t have in my twenties.
Unlike my twenties, when I started this whole show, I understand that sometimes (often) a big white cis-male needs to shut the hell up and follow the lead of more marginalized communities. I understand that my active role as an ally is actually more important than my potential role as a leader; I will be doing more good supporting the voices of others with my privilege than exercising it myself. I understand that my own ego isn’t a priority to the movement.
On a personal level I’ve learned more than a bit: I have an understanding of how to manage a work/life/cause balance. I understand that I have physical and emotional limitations. I have responsibilities to a family that can’t just be brushed off as inconvenient… but I have an amazing spouse who is right there alongside me, a benison that I didn’t remotely expect or deserve.
I’m older, slower and (hopefully) wiser, but I also remember what it was like to be young and free and brave. My enthusiasm is tempered by my experience. And I’m still signing the occasional cheque. So… yeah. That’s why I think people might want to give a shit about my opinion. Maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong. But I’m here, and I’m making the effort, and I hope I’ve got something useful to contribute.
And if I can do it, anyone can.
