Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Solutions for this summer's problems

Summer’s here and the time is right for marchin’ in the street. Or maybe Village walkway. I can’t imagine a street protest in Whistler.

Summer’s here and the time is right for marchin’ in the street. Or maybe Village walkway.

I can’t imagine a street protest in Whistler. I mean, if you look up "complacency" in the dictionary, there’s a little picture of Whistler Village to illustrate it. Protest? In Whistler? You might as well contemplate skiing in Kansas or palm trees in the Yukon.

It’s not like we’re stupid enough to host the G7 conference or the World Economic Forum or something of their ilk that suck in protesters from around the world like phony rich guys suck in Realtors. Let’s face it, there is some conference business that hopefully even we’re not greedy enough to book.

But the Luddites, the anti-freetraders, the chippers away at the monolithic corporate power pig, the underemployed and overworked, and the just plain wackos who "love the smell of teargas in the morning," might be coming to town to protest the annual meeting of the Pacific North West Economic Region cabal. Max to protesters: Get a life.

Of course, it you decide to come, it’s in our nature to welcome you. Try to leave the village more or less standing and remember, panhandling is illegal in Whistler. So is swearing. Up against the wall, Motherlover.

Protests, if they come, will be interesting if for no other reason than it will give our local RCMP another chance to overreact and send out press releases about Whistler going "up in flames" or some other overwrought hyperbole. This assumes they trot out the same old, worn out reactions to protesters – clubs, teargas, pepper spray, body armour, swat teams, assault rifles, stun grenades, fire hoses, hungry dogs, trained bears... okay, I made up the part about the bears.

What’s clearly needed here is a change of tactics. In Quebec City earlier this year, the various arms of law enforcement spent enough on teargas to have quelled the mobs by simply dropping that much hard cash on them from a floating dirigible. The unruly would have stopped in their tracks, scooped up bills, retreated to a local brasserie and gone home with a few bucks left in their pockets, a good buzz and epic tales about how they beat the moneymen at their own games. But nooooo, the cops wanted a fight and a fight is what they got.

I’m not suggesting showering money on any protesters who come to town. That’s so Eastern Canadian. Here on the left coast, we need a made-in-the-West solution and I’m pretty sure you can guess I’ve got one in mind.

What’s B.C. known for? Well, other than letting logging companies rape old-growth forests. Yeah, and other than crooked politicians who can’t finish a term in office. Pot. B.C. is known world-wide for growing possibly the strongest pot on the face of the earth.

B.C. pot is so kick-ass, a straight and narrow snowboarder who attends a party where someone in another room might be smoking a skinny, little joint runs the risk of actually having enough of the second-hand smoke seep into his blood to make him flunk a doping test administered by a corrupt, international sports governing body.

B.C. pot is so strong, there is still a significant part of the local population wearing flowers in their long hair, driving VW micro buses and favouring tie-dyed T-shirts. In B.C., these people are called businessmen and run what was recently announced as the single largest business – in terms of total sales – in the province: marijuana production and sales.

B.C. pot is so strong, it’s a weapon. And therein lies both the beauty and the answer. If the cops want to take the steam out of a protest in Whistler Village, all they really need to do is open up the evidence lockers, roll up a couple of thousand joints, hire the skids who hang out in the village to pass them out to the protesters and pray to God there’s enough chips and candy bars on hand at the Grocery Store to handle the munchies that follow. Stoned, sated, dazed and confused, protesters will be left sprawling in the streets, looking up at the pretty clouds, saying "Whoa, dude, that one looks like a pony." Problem solved.

If only all problems were so easy.

I have no solution to offer to the recent God thing that’s been playing itself out in the letters to the editor section of Pique . If I did, I probably wouldn’t waste it on our local religious war when there’s a Northern Ireland or Middle East to sell it to. But I knew it would happen sooner or later. Strife follows religion like Gesundheit follows a sneeze. Chalk it up to the fervour of belief or some other affliction of the anointed.

That it took a building to bring the schisms of intolerance to the surface is interesting. That we managed to live in a town where such a building was more or less missing for so long is even more interesting but unfortunately, we’re about as likely to go back to that state of affairs as we are to see a $200 season pass again.

Someone in the recent verbal dustup said churches were one of the first buildings pioneers built in most places. That is true. Of course, one might speculate they only built churches after they’d managed to kill off the local Indians and needed somebody new to fight. What better way to fire up a conflict than by establishing tribal differences within their own population?

I don’t think this is God’s fault, although he/she is as convenient an excuse as any for what really amounts to small-minded thinking. I mean, if God is God – and I’m not admitting the point – then the Word of God is the Word of God and a rose is a rose is a rose. Any differences in interpretation are, by definition, the misunderstanding of man. This whole my God’s better than your God pissing match is really, well, un-Godlike, don’t you think?

The ultimate irony comes full circle to the building. John Lennon said God is a concept by which we measure our pain. Baba Ram Dass said we are all God. The most spiritual, Godlike people I’ve ever met bore no religious affiliation whatsoever. They simple walked in the shadow of God. They were good people who lived the Golden Rule and found whatever spiritual richness their lives needed in the simple tasks of the day and the wonder of nature in its manifold guises.

They didn’t need the fairy tales or mythology of the Bible and they certainly didn’t need a building. You can’t house God in a building. You can only confine and distort whatever meaning the very concept of God carried in the first place.

Tear down the walls, Motherlover.