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Local Paramedic Thomas Green starts an NGO dedicated to confronting global overpopulation. “On a global level, we have doubled and redoubled our numbers, and are now confronting a world of too many people and too few resources. Its not just the food and water shortages that are strained by the heavy consumption that is our lifestyle, its the shortage of time, too.”
In April, Green was part of a team that found the body of 93 year-old Maeve Thiery, who had died in her high-rise apartment building and remained undiscovered until now, 5 years after her assumed time of death. Thiery had only been found when her landlord went to enquire about why her automatic rent-withdrawals had stopped coming.
“Too many people here are using too many resources, and I feel that enough people are conscious of the fact that new paths to action are expected. So, that is why I am getting a Vasectomy.” The goal of Green's organization, PopulationCTRL (Population Cuts Targeting Reproduction Levels), is to encourage 1000 men to admit to the choice not to reproduce through obtaining vasectomies. The men are to chronicle the journey through digital video-cameras as they share their experience with families and loved ones, and to tell of why they think the responsibility to curb booming population levels begins at home.
Green says “When we discovered Maeve, my heart broke. And it's not the first time either! With the way people are being shuffled into new cities, chasing jobs and being forced out of their homes because they can't afford the rent, our elders are getting left behind, and with the way we have computers taking care of everything, we don't need to see people who live 10 feet away. People die and are forgotten all the time, and maybe its just better that people begin to choose not to have more children at all.”

PopulationCTRL, which came online last week, already has 37 registered participants, including self-styled 'street-philosophers' like Steve Vassell. “The idea appealed to me because, you know, I don't have kids, my brother has two, and everyday I see on the news 'Food Shortage', or 'Fire in overcrowded slum' and I don't think, 'whoa, those people over there, they breed like rabbits, there are just too many of them' because its not 'them', its us! Us! Its not even the numbers of people, its the way that people like 'us' live here in the industrialized worlds. The way we eat, the way we live – we take so much and leave so little for anyone else. So, I thought 'Hey, my brother's got kids, my genes are safe, you know, in a way, and so, why not just live a good life and help my brother out instead of making more waste and taking more away from somebody else who needs it.”

That sort of thinking is not confined to 'street-philosophers' (whatever that means!), but are being confirmed by professionals at the Institute for Future Economics. Project Director Ellen Ming says more. “At the rate of inflation, and with the increase in government deregulation, the market is now freer than ever before, and those goods and services of any quality will see a rise in price to reflect their stature. For those who are not working in the good jobs, like the financial services or skilled trades, or even those who are not in the higher civil servant or security contractor pay-ranges, affording the best in life good hypothetically cast more than the traditional two-income family could afford. If larger families made the decision to invest in one family line instead of multiple family lines, the quality of life would be far superior.”

PopulationCTRL does is not free of its critics, though. Evan A. D. Jantzi participated in a similar project that took place Atlanta during the 1980's. “I thought that, with all the people in the world, that doing this would be really noble, a really good idea. I was an idiot.” Jantzi regretted his decision immediately, and eventually decided to undergo an uninsured and expensive operation to restore his reproductive capacity. “Only some people can have the procedure 'undone', and I had realized that I wanted kids, I wanted to have a baby with my...with my now-ex, but then current, girlfriend. It was expensive, but, you know, I am glad it could be reversed.” Jantzi was dumped by his girlfriend shortly after the procedure; he still has no children.

Green is not discouraged. “You know, this organization isn't, you know, forcing people to get vasectomies. That would be crazy; there are some people you wish we could, you know, take the snips too, you know what I'm saying? But really, its not a decision we force on people, or ask to take lightly.”

For more information, check out PopulationCTRL's website www.itshiptosnip.ca .

Summer Vacation

summer of 2010, the G20 (in reality 46 countries, but 'one' of the 'twenty' is the European Union, knocking it down some) invaded Toronto under the governance of a strong-arm economist amidst a culture of fear. A year or more of intense surveillance of social justice workers, environmentalists, migrants, refugee, labor, and activist-workers; a parliamentary climate where opposition was met with funding cuts and dismissals; where our history books (okay, our new immigrant guides, which is in a way the first history of this country that new immigrants see) have been 'moderated' to write homosexuality out of our society; all this was haunting me and my friends as we hung-out on the toronto streets, helicopters high overhead circling like vultures. THe G20 had come; the storm was brewing...

But it wasn't a single day, nor a slew of days were the skies heaved and the rains of trouble fell. This was like a storm that began to pick-up midwinter, only to find itself blowing stronger into hurricane season. The g20 - and all the events that had come before that - budget cuts to womens groups, decrying global warming; a tough-on-crime campaign that played up our fears of 'identity theft' and 'terrorism', while corporate crime was rewarded.

Did you know the G20 was invented in 1999!!!

That's right, 1999 by Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, and Lawrence Summers - an American, of course ('kinda makes all that talk about a unified North America sound plausible, eh? You should look up the SPP sometime - these fuckers are not our friends.)

So, the G20, invented out of the blue a decade earlier, now 'saves us' from the Recession of '08 (ironic since Lawrence Summers was making a point of not regulating global markets and permitting the 'too big to fail banks' to get so big that they were 'too big to fail'), and is now committed to a course of austerity measures, slashing the global defecit by 50% by 2013. Twenty. Thirteen. In three years, the government will retract funding in every which way possible (save for prisons, christian reform schools, and military 'exploration' of the arctics vast resources - don't worry; it becomes increasingly cheaper as global warming melts the arctic ice), and that means social security, education, and health care - that means heritage and language, that means social services and immigration assistance. That means disaster.

So, the banking crisis, now our crisis, engineered by the same people who have managed to ensure that their benefits are insured (while ours aren't), are hosting the G20 - and running the table. Canada, at the insistence of Stephen Harper, pushed these austerity measures sought to make these austerity cuts the number one issue, at the expense of Western wars in the middle-east (Afghanistan, Iraq, eventually Pakistan and Iran) and Climate Change (industrial society's war on the Earth's environmental water, food, temperature-regulation, and air systems). These austerity measures are known as "Greek style" (Be careful when you google that one kids) and will be fierce, and will not be concerned with high unemployment or low consumer confidence. Canada hid the effects of these measures, what the people on the street were protesting about (in many cases), behind the 'window dressing' of a concern for child and maternal health - this, of course, is a crock on the basis of the government recently taking initiatives to close Status of Women offices, to kill prior efforts at a national childcare program, and have made clear where their ideals lay in the land of a woman's choice through their ideologically-driven funding selections for overseas aid. (In case you didn't know, those that supported abortion and being pro-choice had their funding cut).

Sorry, meandering; I bet this sounds like the ramblings of one of those crazy traumatised types you see in action/thriller/horror movies. those 'survivors'; a little shell shocked, a little shakey - but still kicking it out, telling the important narratives that make the plot twist...

Well, that's distracting, I'm a little stoned, and so mildly discombobulated, but I'll hold it together. Back to the helicopters.

The helicopters circled Toronto and security forces patrolled the streets, allowing for theatrical violence to peak and swell, and real violence to be shamelessly undereported by the newspapers. Not until later when a public outcry was made and some journalists began to see and decry the pattern of political-terrorism did the public begin to hear it. The helicopters circled overhead, and the police stormed on the ground, and people I know and love were kidnapped off the ground - when I say kidnapped, I mean not shown a warrant or read their rights, nor told what they were being detained for, but actually grabbed and thrown in a van by plain clothes police officers, who for all intents and purposes really could have been kidnappers - people i know and love were stolen before, during, and after the g20 because they stood up to this corporate-conservative-liberal mess. They still get kidnapped - happened just the other day.

So, my summer vacation (see, there is a point to this) has fundamentally been watching my country, my world, a latticework of communities, stand up to financial murder and blood-resource extraction, and then knowing that they're getting punished for it, knowing that those who aren't immediately harmed are immediately engaged with trying to help, and then knowing that its only gotten worse since then.

The government has just passed a law granting police and federal prosecutors invasive new powers, allowing them to arrest and search and wire-tap more freely than ever before. This government, one saying that it is essential to reduce spending has now committed billions more dollars to prison construction on the pretext of unreported crime. After all, Canadians need to learn to report these 'unreported crimes', a.k.a. to snitch on their neighbors, to the police who are now more free than ever simply to invade your life (when conveniently we are building new jails to fill).

Ladies and gentlemen, people who reject gender binaries, this shit is fucked.

FIGHT BACK

To the police; FIGHT BACK!

You're not trying hard enough.
Have you let any articulate street-hipster tell you the specific reasons why marijuana is illegal; what it does to the body, to the world; and why it being illegal is absurd? I hope so - so FIGHT BACK! DON'T TAKE THIS SHIT! CLUB THAT FUCKING VOICE INTO SUBMISSION - that uptight clothing, those choker ties, those gaudy colors and the greasy hair: BEAT THE VOICE OF THAT LAW DOWN! LISTEN TO THE HIPSTER and refuse to enforce that law - don't get yourself in shit, just don't enforce it. Just say no.

If you want community support, we're here for you. We can help you; back you up. We can do letter writing campaigns, we can do staged events - just don't enforce it.
endprohbitionwaterloo@gmail.com