Vancouver Drift

i was on the bus yesterday, and i saw something that broke my stereotype of a bus driver. there we were, driving along, he was bitching to an old crone (if ever there was one, this was an examplar). The old crone, with her fishing hat confining her mousy eyes, was constantly reiterating to the bus driver about how kids don't respect bus drivers.

after a few stories here and there, snippets picked up in between ipod sessions, we came up past a private catholic school in kits (the pricy part of town that i pretend to be a part of). the bus driver wails on his horn in the school zone. the kids in their plaid green skirts all turn their heads, the traffic assistants (aspiring cops in the making, kids in orange vests). i thought he was tramatized, but then he started waving out the window. a small girl turns, puzzled. yells out "daddy!! that's my daddy!!!" and starts running after the bus. all the little girls, barely 8, start waving and smiling.

i see a proud look in the corner of the large bus rearview mirror. that's my kid, that's my daughter, he proclaims with proud eyes. it was a movie moment.

but what shocked me, was that a bus driver could afford, or let alone want to, send his child to a private catholic school in the most expensive part of town. it just didn't add up for me. my mind is too small. i started to question what i expected out of a bus driver. i questioned them as bus drivers and as people. in our society, i think we start to see people more as tools than as people.

the bus driver brings me as close to home as the route allows.
he is an engine. he is there because life has thrown him the lower middle class card and he is a product of his circumstance. he goes home to his slightly overweight, pale skin oprah loving wife, where his only solace from a hard day working the streets of vancouver is the drink beer, eat nuts on a dinner table watchin the canucks beat up the visiting team. this is the bus driver.

who is the student?

the back of the package claims "a warm hug on a cold day".

it better make good it's promise. everyday is a cold day.

read a good book lately? been enthralled in the setting? felt like you were living in this fictious world of words and whispers? then you may be guilty of escapism. the divide between fiction and fact is not quite as clear if you really think about it. fiction is a mutation of the experiences and mutations of reality. we interpret facts and make them fiction. we tell stories. these stories are constructed realities which are created by reality as well as helps create the very reality that of its birth.

i love being completely lost in fiction. i love picking up a good book and watching, first amused, and then quickly disinterested as the world around you just melts away into the background of the protagonist and his/her conflict. lost in the constructed reality. makes you wonder about what you know as reality. i mean, reality to you, isn't it just another story, another construction of what we think what is?

reality is very different for me compared with a bus driver, or a millionaire. we decide what we make real and what we deem fiction. the lines smudge. escape seems so comforting. delusions some may call them. but for the heretic heuristics amongst us, we call them good stories.

what is the past and what hold does memory have on it? the past is gone. the past does not exist. it's like a road you keep walking on, but once u look back, the path disappears. there is nothing there but memories of what was right in front of you. recalling the past, is just telling stories.

i guess to begin, i will start off with something lifted from chomsky: did mitch have a class bias?

Flooding in Honduras or Bangladesh takes a huge toll. An earthquake measuring 7.7 on the Richter scale shook up California in 1992 and one person died. A less intense earthquake in Managua left 15,000 victims. A typhoon in Bangladesh can signify half a million lives.

It's a question of good governance or lack thereof. Why are the poor always most affected by disaster? According to Chomsky, because the poor farmers in Posoltega, Nicaragua, were pushed into the most ecologically fragile zones, most unsuitable for agriculture. In other words, the poor were pushed by government and capital to more risky ecological locations. The result? A devastating and deadly mudpie in Posoltega where entire families were buried by mud and dirt with inadequate government aid. The president refused to declare a state of emergency, there was little advanced warning. And of course, the agri-export industry monopoly in the less compromising ecological regions benefited from the fertile ground that the rains gave them.

It's a sad reality. Why do I only see the urban poor in the streets in New Orleans? This disaster feels so similar yet so different than the tsunami in asia at the start of the new year. The attitudes... This is where we get into the rights of humans. As Sarah brought to my attention, the attitude of new orleans seems so different from the people affected by the tsunami. In new orleans, it seems more like, This is OUR right to be saved to be compensated to be insured, to be safe. Flip the page upside down and you see Asia says "help us help ourselves. the disaster has happened, we are in serious need of help". Life dealt asia a Bunsen poker hand to start off, but they are still hopeful that they will be saved on the turn and the river. Rights... I don't think there was any vehement debate on the rights of the victims to help.

Now both parties have equal rights as humans if you subscribe to the universalist school of human rights. But the attitudes are so different. Does that change the universalist claim that all humans deserve equal rights? Or does it lend support to a more culturally relativistic conception of human rights? In the tsunami situation in asia, there was little talk of the right to food, water and security. It was more like, this is what is needed. "what can you spare?". Not, "this is our right, government, start the hamster wheels of justice!".

I will try to expound on this later. Just some thoughts right now.




New Orleans is sinking, and I don't want to swim.

credit goes to nathan: blog.

i am too lazy to design a page from scratch, so i ripped off his css. i shall eventually modify it but i am a big fan of his design style and will probably keep it like this for awhile anyway.

cheers to nathan, a great talent, that should not go to waste.