In a recent press conference, B.C. Premier John Horgan announced to those of us residing within its borders that “fatalities are a part of life.” These words were gifted amidst a conflagration, as regionally we are experiencing hundreds of deaths from an unprecedented heat wave and forest fires, part of a longer even deadlier pattern of ecocide-induced climate change.
Perhaps this was news to Horgan but most of us have been grappling with this already, this thing about fatality and life and the moment we’re in. We’ve all seen it: summers have been getting progressively hotter, and that’s not only a reference to the weather. More than one tension has hit a boiling point and fatalities are common as crows. Last summer, we saw a world on fire with marches in protest against racism and police brutality. This summer, in B.C. alone we are sitting at the nexus of several crises: climate change and opioid deaths, [burial sites] of murdered and then discarded Indigenous children, class war on the houseless, brutal extraction of old growth trees, a truly global pandemic.
Which is certainly not to say that the anti-black racism and police brutality went away. They didn’t. Even the Canadian state’s recent day of self-celebration was doused in a sea of orange shirts and collective grief. All while disparity deepens as the wealthiest people in the world get richer, their wealth growing proportionally to the rest of our devastation, their colonizing gaze turned excitedly now to outer space.
Oddly, however, the tragedies we have been served and our response to the people and systems that serve them, to their condescending condolences, have not been so proportional. The ruling class has put fatality on a platter and, though we smell the poison cooking in the kitchen, we eat it, because they told us it’s all they could make and besides; it’s only polite to eat first, complain later (using the designated complaint box located inside a dumpster out back, of course).
They call this nuance.
They call this justice.
They’ve worked hard to bring this kind of fatality to us, and they have our relatives and neighbours working for them in the kitchens too, who have found security and even solace in the steadiness of the poison work— don’t we care about that? In our outrage, have we really taken everything into account?
The better question is can we? Can we care about the delicate intricacies of electoral politics and the hearts of the people who do it? Do we have the time? The answer, I’m certain, is no. We don’t, not if that means compromising on our own survival, which is a zero-sum game. And if the rising death toll isn’t making that clear then I’m not sure what will.
What I know is that the currently acceptable responses to capitalism and colonialism’s planetary destruction are not cutting it, and they’re not cutting it because they’re not designed to. Rule makers do not make rules that permit the abolition of their or their business acquaintances’ social status, or their right to property, accumulation, exploitation, pollution, and power. Last year, during discussions amongst young Prince George organizers about what we might demand of the city in terms of anti-racism, we were warned not to “demand” anything of city council, because they wouldn’t respond to demands. Indeed, bourgeois politics is a soup of ego, but that one was baffling, especially given the subject matter. You have to ask nicely, I was told not for the first time, that’s politics, that’s how these things are done.
I argue that’s not how you get things done, that’s just how you appease people. That’s how you save them and their system from the kinds of friction and frustration that might lead to important revelations about what they have done, are doing, to all of us. It is their prerogative to be appeased and they have corralled us very well into sharing this belief.
“You catch more flies with honey then with vinegar,” we tell each other.
And absolutely this is true if what you’re trying to do is get your brother to help you move your couch, but that’s only because the stakes are low enough to permit niceties and you and your brother love each other. As disability writer Imani Barbarin reminds us, there is niceness, and then there is goodness, and these are not the same thing and can even be at odds. This is what those of us at the margins already know: the ability to recognize the difference between what is nice and what is good is a life-or-death skill.
But that’s just not how it works, they say, so instead of making good and doing right and staying alive we cater to the egos of those in charge. We make signs and put them up where they tell us we can, we run our marches through approved routes, we make petitions for them to fold into cute coasters for the hot coffee they drink in an air conditioned office, and in turn they give us only what they were already prepared to give, because this was never a negotiation over the conditions of people’s lives, this was an exercise in (to borrow from some of our own city councillors in a recent debate over the Safe Streets Bylaw) “compliance.”
Compliance as a concept is interesting for many reasons, but especially as we consider those who have rejected masks and other public safety measures throughout the pandemic. We are a society obsessed with individual rights, an obsession that comes often at the expense of collective ones. We have watched the same government officials wring their hands over enforcing life-saving public health measures who didn’t even blink before sending the RCMP to arrest Wet'suwet'en grandmothers for protesting on their own land. Compliance can be dangerous in social hierarchies like this one, as it is self-justifying and can only punch down. I mean, we can’t seem to make them comply to their own campaign promises, to paying taxes, to not bailing out oil corporations that still just laid workers off anyway. We can’t get them to comply to their own budget for a parking structure downtown. It’s a one-way street.
So really there are very few people for whom compliance and fatality are necessities of social life, and it is not you or me. Let’s return to the Horgan quote that prompted this writing. I think it’s very important that we not confuse his point here by misreading it. He did not say death is a part of life, as the old adage goes, he said fatalities. Fatalities are social, they are caused, they happen as a result of human action or inaction. They are not part of the life cycle, the one that we cherish, they are obstructions to it. They are a fact, yes, but they are not necessary. The only people that the notion “fatalities are part of life” benefits are those responsible for the fatalities in question. If I were a hawk, I would probably tell mice the same thing.
This is not about intention, though, as perhaps even Horgan wishes there were an edit button for that one. And I do, in spite of myself, care that people mean well, but we have raised our concerns through the appropriate channels and tones for longer than we really had time for.
Summer after boiling summer we are (re)learning that niceness can be fatal, compliance too, and I and many others are not willing to watch our community, the land or its peoples, die en masse to uphold a sense of decorum and a mode of production that will be obsolete when we are gone.
After all, what’s left to sacrifice? We are already on fire.
- UNBC graduate Soili Smith is a teaching assistant and PhD student in American Studies at Rutgers University, Newark.
