Here are a few excerpts from the Canadian Press article called: Excerpts from a B.C. court ruling regarding Vancouver’s safe injection site.
Justice Ian Pitfield, showing inspiring wisdom, writes:
“…A law that infringes life, security of the person or liberty is unconstitutional unless it accords with the principles of fundamental justice. A law that is arbitrary, overbroad or grossly disproportionate in its effect contravenes those principles. It need not be all of those things. A law that is either arbitrary, overbroad or disproportionate cannot withstand Charter scrutiny…
“Denial of access to Insite and safe injection for the reason stated by Canada amounts to a condemnation of the consumption that led to addiction in the first place, while ignoring the resulting illness. While there is nothing to be said in favour of the injection of controlled substances that leads to addiction, there is much to be said against denying addicts health care services that will ameliorate the effects of their condition.
“Society does that for other substances such as alcohol and tobacco. While those are not prohibited substances, society neither condemns the individual who chose to drink or smoke to excess, nor deprives that individual of a range of health-care services. Management of the harm in those cases is accepted as a community responsibility.
“I cannot see any rational or logical reason why the approach should be different when dealing with the addiction to narcotics, an aspect of which is that the substance that resulted in the addiction in the first place will invariably be ingested in the short-term and possibly in the long-term because of the very nature of the illness.
“Simply stated, I cannot agree with the [Government of] Canada’s submission that an addict must feed his addiction in an unsafe environment when a safe environment that may lead to rehabilitation is the alternative.”
Could a closing comment be more utterly obvious, yet disgustingly debated, at the cost of compassion, the addicted individual, their family members, the community in general, and even pragmatically speaking the tax-payer who, due to somebody’s ignorant moralizing, must pay for the treatment of those whose harm potential is increased by said moralizing?
A dear friend of mine took part the other day in a protest against the State of Isreal’s building of a separating wall in the West Bank village of Nil’in:
Ramallah—Ma’an:
Several Palestinian civilians, including journalists, were injured when Israeli troops forcibly dispersed a demonstration against the separation wall in the West Bank village of Nil’in, near Ramallah, on Tuesday.
The spokesperson of the Popular Committee for resisting the separation wall in Ni’lin, Salah Khawaja, said that Israeli troops used tear gas, live ammunition, rubber-coated metal bullets, water cannons, rifle butts and clubs to break up the peaceful demonstration. Khawaja added that several people were arrested. International and Israeli solidarity activists participated in the rally…
If completed, Israel’s illegal West Bank wall will result in the de facto confiscation of 2,500 dunams of Nil’in’s land. Expanding Israeli settlements and other methods of closure, in addition to the wall, will completely separate the villages of of Ni’lin, Mediya, Shukba, Shabteen and Budrus from the rest of the West Bank.
“…after the protesters entered the closed military zone and throw [sic] stones at the stationed Border Police troops, they took action to disburse the demonstration and arrested two of the activists.”
In response, my friend wrote back to the editors of Ha’aretz:
I am a Canadian who was there today, along with people from France, Holland and Britain. So it’s not true that only Palestinian and Israeli activists took part…
I’ve been in the West Bank for less than a week. I went to Israel briefly 8 years ago, but that’s my only other time in this region. I am Jewish.
I came to Ramallah to visit a British friend who’s writing a book here. I was thinking of writing a travel article about Palestine, but I never intended to get involved in demonstrations.
I am not and have never been an activist. …
I want you to know that the demonstration today was a peaceful one.
As we walked to the site (which, by the way, looked nothing like a closed military zone to me—there wasn’t one warning sign or marker to be found anywhere), the leader of the Palestinian protesters reminded his group over a loudspeaker that they were to be peaceful, not throw stones, and wave only the Palestinian flag.
As we stopped at least one hundred metres away from the line of soldiers standing in front of the bulldozers, an Israeli activist announced to the soldiers in Hebrew that we were here in peace.
Within seconds, and totally without warning, the soldiers fired tear gas canisters at us and launched gas grenades above and behind us…
I was near the back of the group and I started running away immediately, but a jeep pulled up alongside me and used an automatic launcher to fire a stream of tear gas canisters at me. Not above or around or behind me, but directly at me.
And so it goes, decade after decade, the truth largely besides the point. Power, it seems to me, wherever it is greatest, will exercise its force and virtually always defend and justify its right to do so.
Here’s footage of the protest and the attack of tear gas and so on, that was posted by someone to youtube, which continues to stand as a possible forum of inconceivable solidairty against brutality (and simultaneously an inconceivable forum for propaganda and division).
Nevertheless, one can only try to make sisters and brothers see that almost all of us, under relatively normal circumstances, have relatively similar aspirations:
My friend posted a report of the events on Facebook. In response to doing so…
An Israeli friend…dumped me via facebook today because of my posting about the protest. He called me a hypocrite and blocked me from ever contacting him again. This was the guy who said he would never go to Palestine because he doesn’t want anything to do with ‘those people’.
I guess I’m one of ‘those people’ to him now.
This type of thinking, of course, goes both ways and is not immune to any culture or nation I know—and has done so forever.
It is a truism that one could be for the State of Israel, yet against brutal or criminal actions that the State undertakes. I could be against a friend, say, smoking or doing crack, but I am not against my friend.
How difficult it is for humans to see beyond the suffering of one’s own tribe!
It is ridiculous and perverse how protesting what could easily be considered even the criminal mistreatment of Palestinian civilians by Israeli Forces (even if said protesters were, for whatever reason, found to be mistaken), becomes de facto, or by definition, an Anti-Israel act.
What I am about to write is hardly revelatory, but similarly, protesting against the Vietnam Invasion and relentless, mass-killing bombings in the 1960s was Anti-American.
Protesting against the Iraq Invasion today is Anti-American.
It is worth noting that a German protesting against the the treatment of Jews in the 1930s and 40s would have undoubtedly been Anti-German.
So it goes for protesting against the Soviet Union’s heinous invasion of Afghanistan, which was surely anti-Russian.
And of course protesting against Apartheid in South Africa was not only Anti-South African, but illegal.
In contrast, no matter how illegal or murderous or even expensive the Iraq Invasion and Occupation becomes, being for the Iraq Invasion and Occupation is never labeled Anti-American. A curious, internalized double standard.
What could be more Anti-German (and anti-human and heinous), ultimately, than being for the expulsion or extermination of Jews?
For that matter, what could be in some ways be more Anti-American than being for the Vietnam Invasion, which was directly and indirectly involved in the killing of, if one includes all of Indochina, 3.4 million people, none of whom ever invaded or even threatened to invade America?
Why are we at times so myopic in defending atrocities committed by our State, whatever State that may be?
If nothing else, suffering is a human condition, and being here is, at some time, damn difficult for virtually everyone, across the board, regradless of the State or tribe they are from.
It is remarkable how the mistreatment of or violence against other people is invariably justified by describing said people as something less than those perpetrating the violence.
So many people with otherwise good hearts and intelligence do this.
To see more expansively, people must be able to at least temporaily detach themselves from the label by which they define themselves. They must, in effect, climb over the walls that separate them from being able to bear witness another being’s suffering.
The irony of not doing this with the walls in Israel can surely not be lost on anybody with even a cursory knowledge of history. The examples are endless.
This dear friend of mine also wrote, naturally, and in a state of slight shock, of the uncertainty of having gone to the protest, due to the danger involved. For what it’s worth, I wrote this back:
One little comment about doing something and not doing something, I read this line today:
“There has never been a convenient time to protest against injustice.”
And even if nothing helps, witnessing is vital.
It’s one thing and terrible to be relentlessly beat up. But imagine no one knowing or believing that’s happening.
It’s a great aspect of the human spirit to witness in solidarity against injustice, because everything eventually changes in some direction…
In solidarity, I wish my sisters and brothers, Israeli, Palestinian, all of them, greater compassion, love and safety—and bigger eyes and thoughts to counter our built-in hatreds. As for those being oppressed, those who have limited or no control over their own lives, I yearn for them (and protest for them), that they may achieve the freedom and dignity they inherently deserve, as beings on this challenging, wondrous planet.
Check out the trailer of Salute: The Peter Norman Story. I love when Norman said he just wants to be remembered as an ‘interesting old guy.’
The writer, director and producer of the film is Peter Norman’s nephew Matt Norman…
“…who…was shattered in 2006 when Peter Norman died tragically of a heart attack before seeing the finished film. This is Matt’s tribute to his best friend and uncle…”
How sweet is that?
With the Beijing Olympics fast approaching, this commentary from Harry Edwards in 1968 seems remarkably yet unsurprisingly prescient.
“[T]he Olympic Games as an ideal of brotherhood and world community is passé. The Olympics is so obviously hypocritical that even the Neanderthals watching TV know what they’re seeing can’t be true.
Even Neanderthals know that the Russians stomped the Czechs and that the Jews despise the Arabs and that racists rule the US [this list, of course, can go on and on].
So, all of a sudden, the Olympics comes on TV—all this smiling and hand shaking, and even the Neanderthal has to sit up and say, “Hey, what the hell? How can that be? All year I watch nothin’ but hate on TV; now they come on with the love! It’s gotta be phony. The Olympics gotta be a put-on, man.”
A curious documentary about boxing in Cuba, that reveals…well, it was both revealing and curious.
The ugliness of the current regime is instantly apparent, evident even in the title, Victory Is Your Duty, taken from some ignorant slogan.
As for the interview at the bottom of the the film clips on the PBS page, with American intellectual Dr Andy Gomez, I just didn’t find it enlightening at all. The man, it seems to me, speaks what feels like pure agenda (politics—which will kill any honest intellectual), which by definition therefore offers limited nuance, and relatively unexpansive thinking.
Perhaps there is nothing good about the revolution and/or Castro, but if there is, Mr Gomez sure couldn’t find anything, even with the question repeated.
A friend of mine is in Palestine, and in a letter repeated something she heard, which for me was so much more revealing than a scholars entire interview.
She was told that:
[W]hen you come to Palestine, after a week you feel like you could write a book because there’s so much going on and it’s all so interesting. After several months, you can maybe write a paragraph, and after a year you can eke out a sentence. That’s how confusing and disillusioning it gets.
This reminds me of the description I heard about Cuba, from years back:
The hundred percent medical coverage and literacy is fantastic. Now all they have to figure out is how to get three meals a day.
Anyway, Victory Is Your Duty is here and worth seeing, just to witness the endlessly blatant and ugly cult-of-personality propaganda, as opposed to really expensive, all pervasive yet somehow subtle propaganda.
Suffice to say it isn’t easy being human, engulfed by a ‘condition’ (humanness) which also, thankfully, offers shocking amounts of love, joy, affection and compassion.
Here’s to sisters and brothers everywhere, seeking internal and external liberation,
Just got back from Pennsylvania (Easton and Philadelphia, and Chicago and Jacksonville, Illinois before that).
I had a wild and candid interview with the inimitable Larry Holmes, whose career speaks for itself (and speaks loudly).
Mr Holmes was insightful and generous, and his story, from leaving school at grade seven to becoming world champion is, upon any sort of reflection, staggering and inspiring.
One of the great Heavyweights of all-time, he speaks with just as much force and down home clarity as did his left jab, which was penetrating, uncensored and unstoppable.
Larry also spent a great deal of the early seventies as Muhammad Ali’s main sparring partner, which allows for even deeper insight into the vibe of the day.
On the way home, I wrote a very quick poem which came to me as I looked across Lake Ontario on route to catching the connecting flight from Toronto to Vancouver. In one way the poem has nothing to do with pugilism, and in another way, everything to do with it. Ain’t life like that sometimes.
BODIES OF WATER
Uncountable ripples upon the sea
Moving to the direction of the wind
Separated in the wake
of other intentions
Rising in size, glory remains subjective
Begining again; seeming to disappear; over and over
This is the story of being
All is well. Home can be a beautiful thing—and it is for me. May your heart be happy, your body light. Lots of love to you,
I’ve written a few times about Partners in Health, mentioned the inspiring book by Tracy Kidder called Mountains Beyond Mountains (about Paul Farmer and PIH), and quoted Paul Farmer in a film I wrote and co-directed about HIV/AIDS in Africa called Hope In the Time of AIDS.
Here’s a piece from 60 Minutes about Partners in Health, Paul Farmer, Jim Kim, and the rest of those wonderful folks doing the right and just thing in Haiti, Russia, Boston and elsewhere: trying to make sure that human beings have what they call the ‘human right’ to medical treatment.
That clip, for the record, doesn’t include Paul’s quote, which is:
Making strategic alliances across national borders in order to treat HIV among the world’s poor is one of the last great hopes of solidarity across a widening divide.
Heading to Pennsylvania tomorrow. Ken Norton was great today.
This is very cool. The great Carl Sagan putting his take on Vedic or Hindu cosmology. Intensely and enjoyably researching for the Ali documentary, in a hotel in Jacksonville, Illinois, I thought you might like it:
The plane landed in rain—but any successful landing makes any weather perfect.
I had a remarkable conversation in Toronto with George Chuvalo, a man who in 93 fights was never knocked down—fights against Ali, Foreman, Frazier, Quarry, Ellis, Terrell, Bonavena, Ramos and on and on.
He was even scheduled to fight Sonny Liston in 1971, but Sonny had also died from an overdose. Foul play has, since Sonny’s death, been suggested by some.
George was articulate and funny, candid and inspiring, and his memory for names and dates was uncanny. He spoke of how love from family, from certain friends, is the only thing that that got him and gets him through the devastation of losing (over eleven years, brace yourself), three of his boys to heroin (he has an oldest son and a youngest daughter still living). After the second death of a son by overdose, his wife also took her life.
What a privilege to have the chance talk to him.
BIG GEORGE FOREMAN
This is a great passage from Stephen Brunt’s Facing Ali, in an interview with George Foreman.
“One of my boys came home the other day and he had a shirt on he had bought from the store and it had Ali on it. I said, ‘Man, where did you get that?’
He kind of meekly said such and such.
I said, ‘Boy, that’s nice.’
He said, ‘Everybody said you’d better not wear that around George.’
I said, ‘What? Would you get me one?’
And he couldn’t find that one because it wasn’t big enough, so he got me a red one with a great big picture of Ali. Some designer is selling them. And I wore it. I wore it everywhere. Everybody wondered what I was doing. But would you imagine that someone would think that I lost to Muhammad Ali—we fought in 1974, it’s almost thirty years later—and they would think that that fight continues to this day.
I was ashamed, the idea that a fight happened thirty years ago and you are still messed up about it. Thirty years later? I don’t want anyone to think that that is still in existance.
Joe Frazier, he may have got stuck in this time warp and hasn’t gotten himself out. It takes real good guidance and council and a love of mankind to throw those things away. You just throw that away.
I like Ali. I admire him. And when I saw that film When We Were Kings—they sent me a copy of it—my kids were laughing.
He was talking about the shuffle and what he’ll do—they were laughing and carrying on, with no regard for me. Then I realized it wasn’t about me. They were just enjoying this fellow that I used to enjoy as a boy, too.
He would tell a joke or do a poem and I was so happy. And I recaptured that when I saw that film. I recaptured everything. And now I just love everything.”
“Somewhere in the middle of America/Let’s get to the heart of the matter/It’s the heart that matters more…”
—Counting Crows
Having a great experience here, meeting Ron Lyle in Denver, Leon Spinks in Nebraska, Ernie Terrell in Chicago, and George Chuvalo tomorrow in Toronto. Without hesitation, I can loudly state that all of these legendary boxers—who fought somewhere between the late 1950s to, well, so many comebacks—have been warm, intense, articulate in myriad ways, and candid and funny.
It’s such a privilege speaking to people you know but don’t know, and hearing their stories.
I really feel grateful to be able to explore life through other eyes, other upbringings, other sensibilities, other possibilities—for what else is relationship if not the exploration of these things?
These are people who literally risked their health and even their lives (by choice, no doubt, and yet…), for their own reasons, to be sure, but for the entertainment of others.
All I can say is that I have felt true fondness for them, and joy and respect in their company, and cannot accept that there is not more in place both to increase the physical and economic protection of boxers (standard harm reduction, for the love of god); to compensate them—like most every other profession and most professional sports—upon the completion of their careers.
That in itself would surely have cut down on at least some of the ill-fated, brain-pounding, fighting-to-survive comebacks. It’s tough enough to make a living by starting again at anything at 30 or 40 years of age…
But in boxing…?
As Ernie Terrell said, and I’m paraphrasing: it’ll take the promoters to make this point clear, and to set it in motion, but why would they do so willingly?
Indeed. This is the economic system revealing itself under complete deregulation. And before somebody—understandably perhaps—cries ‘Ban Boxing!’, I say, again, ‘If you want to ban boxing, ban poverty’, for there is an undeniable connection between the two.
If one throws in racism or classism, the connections are virtually complete.
Man it’s been great meeting these guys, and hearing their stories. And the crew I’m working with has been so creative, and so much fun, too.
“In the clearing stands a boxer and a fighter by his trade and he carries a reminder of every glove that laid him down or cut him tell he cried out, in his anger and his pain, “I am leaving, I am leaving” but the fighter still remains…”
—Paul Simon
My apologies for not having written lately. I have been on the road and very busy—but I miss the contact and trying to put out thoughts, ideas (and other people’s ideas) that may be inspiring, edifying or at least thought provoking.
I’m in Denver right now, and am getting a chance to hear the remarkable story of Ron Lyle, who after serving seven and a half years in prison, turned pro at 29, and fought some of the most memorable boxing fights of the 1970s.
The three most memorable were, in fact, three in a row: an 11th round TKO loss to Muhammad Ali in 1975, in which Ron was leading on the judges’ cards before the Technical Knockout, which is another way of saying the fight was stopped.
The two others were slugfests against perhaps the two hardest punchers of the 1970s, Earnie Shavers and George Foreman. The first was a 6th round KO of Earnie (whom we interviewed in Liverpool) and the second a fifth round KO at the hands of George Foreman.
This was George’s first fight after the upset loss to Ali in Zaire. Both fights are almost impossible to believe, and remind the viewer of why people are so pulled to boxing, and why others are so appalled by it—and how those feelings so often coincide in life.
But as I’ve said before, if one really wants to ban boxing, it begins with banning poverty (and racism, and classism)—not to mention the warrior nature. Good luck!
But beyond Ron Lyle’s boxing life, he now runs a gym at the Salvation Army in Denver, teaching kids to box—as he always wanted to do. He also speaks to children in detention centres, sharing his remarkable ‘comeback’ from the prison system.
The project is a great success, bringing together the Hispanic and black communities in the area (as it wasn’t before).
The centre is remarkably well run. Six years ago there were 300 members, 90 percent black, with virtually no Hispanic membership. Now—and a lot to do with the boxing program—there are three thousand members, with a large Hispanic membership and increased caucasian membership.
The Lord works in mysterious ways in a mysterious, yet sometimes practical, world.
The boxers have been terrific, and talking to Ron this morning was simply great. Here’s to trying to make it in a, at times, stunningly difficult and wondrous world.
