Now, it was only a year ago, where one couldn't troll through the Georgia Straight, the Alliance for Art & Culture, or essentially any street corner without seeing some notice of an invitation to make your voice heard: "let a thousand flowers bloom! we will reinvent direct democracy in the heart of the DTES!"
From the North Sky Consulting interviews on the proposed Cultural Precinct, to the Creative City Conversation by the Office of Cultural Affairs, to the UNNARCC-cum-ICAN-cum-UNARC meetings, to the Alliance Roundtables, to the Creative City Network open houses, to the CECC Salons, to the presentation of the DeSacco Report by VanCity, from ad-hoc petitions to save art spaces, to Vision Vancouver summits, it was a veritable alphabet soup of organizations, alliances, and agendas.
Of course, it must be realized that at least half of these were doomed from the start; whether because they were mere window-dressing for developers to pretend they were listening, platforms for politicians to soapbox, alienated, ineffective artist groups that hadn't reached the right audience... but, in essence, there was almost too much of a critical mass to do any good.
I have experienced something like this a few times before in Vancouver, and indeed, it is starting to feel like a quintessential Vancouverism to me; in 1997-8, after the APEC protests at UBC, and 2002-4, with the rebirth of the experimental sound community. With both epochs, various circumstances (largely space-based) contributed to the genesis of large, diverse, and vital communities, ones that were decentralized, forward-thinking, largely horizontal in structure. Without going into too much detail ( I realize I am digressing from my initial point of this post...), I surmise that there is actually a satisfaction quotient at play that engenders complacency (I really should finish reading Collapse by Jared Diamond). Both... societies, scenes, subcultures... whatever you wish to call them, collapsed because of internal dynamics far more than external ones, in my opinion (though the concurrent depletion of the aforementioned space-based circumstances, in the absence of cultural infrastructure, avenues for community justice, congregation, etc. certainly helped).
To take this back to a personal level - I, for one, was starting to feel burnt out with the amount of energy that I was committing towards attending meetings, bridging communities, postulating causes, and the such. As did others. The amount of energy that a few of us put into such things inevitably allowed others to pull out. With UNARC, that is certainly the case... though with it's anti-authoritarian politics, diverse membership, and rising popularity, it should have been the last organization to fall apart.
At a certain level, one must also consider the dynamics inherent in the project of advocacy; that it is essentially a statist enterprise, weighing upon the benediction and consideration of power structures, a type of liberal 'appeal to the common good' approach of political organizing and action that, like any political project, only effects change if the advocate has an uncanny knack with communications or is at the forefront of a tremendous groundswell of political will (which, it could be argued, we were in Vancouver, and if I had less ethical qualms [ or more ?? ], I may have appropriated the role of Leader on a larger level, a Cultural Bolshevik, if you will). In the end, this approach to politics only allows for so much power in the hands of the people, as the final decision making apparatuses are ceded to existing structures; "at the end of the day, son, you did all you could. Now we must await the judges their deliberation, behind closed doors, and accept their ruling as it lay..."
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