• Calgary passes public behaviour bylaw from the CBC

From the article:

The bylaw, which takes effect immediately, makes it illegal to spit, fight, carry a sheath knife, urinate or defecate in public or put one’s feet up on public property.

Fines would range from $50 to $300.

Hang on a sec. I can get fined fifty bucks in Calgary for putting my feet up on public property? This is such a heinous and pervasive offence that we have to put a law on the books to deal with it?

“Oh my God, Susan, that man has his feet on a table! Quick, grab the kids!”

Right. Yeah, those damn foot-resters are a real problem these days. Maybe there’s something else going on here:

The protesters, mostly from Calgary’s anti-poverty community, said the bylaw is discriminatory and unfair. They believe the bylaw targets the homeless while ignoring the root cause of the problems — a lack of affordable housing in Calgary.

Now things are starting to make more sense. The Calgary city council wants to get rid of those damn unsightly poor people, but they can’t really come out and say just that. So instead, they target behaviour they associate with the homeless, adding another six bylaws to everyday life for questionable gain. (Wait a sec. Isn’t fighting already illegal? How about a $50-$300 dollar fine for murder, while we’re at it? After all, if one law against an act doesn’t prevent all instances thereof, maybe we just need more laws against it!)

Yeah, there we go. How do you fix a problem? You pass another piece of legislation. Big Brother Government is your friend, and will fix all of your problems.

(cue rant)

Case in point: the Lower Mainland’s recent problems with drinking water. Did you notice how the government just stepped right in and, quick as a wink, cleaned up the contaminated reservoirs?

No? Neither did I.

So what you have is roughly a million placid docile people — who, lest I seem unsympathetic, committed no greater sin than believing their teachers and their politicians and their newspapers and their televisions when they said that Someone Else Will Take Care Of It, You Just Pay Your Taxes And Buy Your Happy Meals — who are assaulting each other over flats of overpriced water in little plastic bottles with pictures of anonymous mountain streams thereupon. Their illusion that they can let someone else guarantee their basic needs (in this case, potable water) is, shall we say, at odds with reality. I can understand how that makes someone grumpy.

I’m sure that, when we’ve had a chance to catch our collective breath, more legislation will be called for. Special committees will be struck and boards of inquiry will be convened. Laws will be passed against logging around reservoirs. Protests will be stirred for special deliveries of municipally-funded bottled water to particularly needy people. The passive voice will be used by this blogger to make a point.

That’ll be great, if this particular problem crops up again before swarms of lobbyists tear down whatever procedural safeguards we manage to erect. If something else happens — a three-week power failure, for instance — we’ll be just as fucked. Perhaps we should consider providing for our own well-being, given that the West Coast is one gigantic earthquake zone and all. Some clean water, some canned food, batteries, flashlights… these aren’t unreasonable things to have around the house, just in case everything goes mildly to hell for a few days.

What’s unreasonable, I suppose, is coming to grips with the fact that nobody beyond yourself can reliably provide for your own comfort and safety, then taking responsibility for doing just that. It’s a dangerous idea! First you take your grumbling discontent with the goverment (who, let’s be honest, fucked the dog over this water issue) and turn it into a little bit of action. Then, having taken a little bit of action, you find that you feel a little bit safer for having done so.

Hey, that feels kind of good!

So you take some more action, you prepare a little more for life’s little disasters, and you feel even better.  Sooner or later, you start to take pride in being able to cope just a little bit better than you could a month ago.  You start to develop confidence in your ability to roll with the punches.  And then — here’s where it gets subversive — you start to resent people who try to prevent you from providing for your own comfort and safety “for your own good”.

And who knows where that might go?