Dispatches from ground zero of the woke reich

I’ve been back in my hometown of Vancouver, Canada, for a few days now. The big wall-to-wall news story has been about a moron who was speeding around on a jet ski in the harbor off the downtown coast where pods of whales have been swimming around – and ended up using a grey whale as a jump ramp. The whale seems no worse for wear, while the jackass crashed out. I can’t remember the last time that I’ve heard such mass outrage.

This is Vancouver, after all. Home of “save the whales.” Greenpeace was literally founded here in 1971. People here have parked themselves in trees for days on end to save them from being chopped down for development. How could some jackass end up possibly slamming into a whale when anyone with working eyes can see that orcas are everywhere right now, putting on aquarium-like shows in their natural habitat. The answer is simple, really. The whims of a select few have been accommodated for far too long. That is, until something disastrous happens and jolts some people out of their slumber to notice that the institutions have failed to uphold even the most basic common sense. The incident is a metaphor for the whole place these days.

I remember when I was growing up here in the 1980s and wokeism used to mean fighting the good fight for the rights of the oppressed. Labor unions pushing back against creeping demands by the state and its corporatist cronies to give more for increasingly less. Defending animals and nature incapable of advocating for themselves. Equality of opportunity for all was the name of the game. And helping those who fell through the social safety net to get back on their feet.

But then, like the whale jumper, some folks took things too far in their own self-interest. Cottage industries of lobbyists and NGOs popped up to cash in on pushing grievances not towards any constructive resolution benefiting society, but instead to permanent profit for themselves.

And now, like the whale show spectators, average people are finally showing signs of being horrified by the results.

Drug policy is just one example. When former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ran for office a decade ago, he made decriminalizing possession of drugs one of his big selling points. It’s probably the only campaign promise he made that anyone can even still recall. For decades there had been a lobby pushing for it. When I was a criminology post-bac student, one of our guest speakers was a cop who loved the idea and would go around telling anyone willing to listen. The idea was that Vancouver would function like Amsterdam – all sophisticated and enlightened about drug-taking, while neglecting that Amsterdam is all canals and tiny streets. Not like Vancouver where the druggies have all the room in the world to sprawl out on sidewalks and in parks. And if that’s not enough, the provincial government would commandeer hotels for them to live in – which were then promptly destroyed.

So after clinging to its failure for far too long, the same government has now thrown in the towel on decriminalization of drugs. The original goal was to “reduce stigma and fear of criminal prosecution that prevents people from reaching out for help, including medical assistance.” Turns out that giving them a safe place to shoot up, then when that didn’t work giving out free needles, then when that failed just giving them free drugs – all under the pretext that feeding their addiction at the public expense will get them clean – was a major bust. Now the mop-up job is more daunting than ever.

The mess is obvious to anyone without an agenda or a business model based on persistence of the debacle. Homelessness and drug carnage has now merged with the migrant crisis caused by the same woke institutions destroying their own longstanding immigration point system that was the envy of the free world. Because it wasn’t quite free enough, apparently. But now because they treated borders like an option, the borders and boundaries are left to everyday citizens to enforce themselves. Like when an Indian migrant was caught washing his clothes in a protected river, as onlookers yelled at him in a futile attempt to try to explain the concept to someone who could barely even understand the language itself.

Speaking of language barriers, the woke reich has also been going around changing the names of longstanding landmarks to an unpronounceable language of native bands. As provincial legislative assembly member Dallas Brodie has pointed out, her own Vancouver area high school, Point Grey Secondary, is now styling itself as “stəywəte:ń Point Grey Secondary.” So much for getting kids hooked on phonics. Or is it now hooked on p̓xʷán̓əqs? Or p̓hənoq̓s? Maybe p̓hən̓íqs? Perhaps they’ll grasp the new alphabet around the time they figure out their personal pronouns among all the choices available to them these days: she/her, he/him, they/them, she/they, he/they, xe/xem, ze/zir, ze/hir, ey/em, fae/faer, per/per, ve/ver, ne/nem, ae/aer, co/cos, e/em/eir, thon/thons, hu/hum.

Colony Farm is now “ƛ̓éxətəm Regional Park,” the public swimming pool built and named for the 1973 Canada Games, and where I trained as a young competitive swimmer, is now called “təməsew̓txʷ Aquatic and Community Centre,” and the Pattullo Bridge is now the “stal̕əw̓asəm Bridge.” Try plugging that into your GPS.

But the final straw seems to be indulging the natives to the point of making tribal leaders de facto co-governors of the province while doing nothing to repeal the provincial legislation that implements DRIPA – the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act – leaving the average citizen convinced that somewhere between “consultation” and “consent,” the average homeowner may eventually need three permits, two environmental assessments, and a hereditary chief’s blessing just to build a garden shed on their own property.

It’s all become so absurd that you have to wonder how anyone still defends it with a straight face. But sprawling ideological movements rarely collapse without a fight, and the modern alphabet bureaucracy is no exception. Too many people remain invested in propping it up, if only because admitting the excesses would require rethinking years of assumptions, social loyalties, and their own identities. Like the guy who launched his jet ski off a whale, the woke crowd spent years thinking that they could mow down everything without wiping out.

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