Vancouver Violence

Vancouver has felt very violent over the last few months. The incidents I remember are the obvious ones:

A mentally unstable, yet harmles, man gunned down by police at Granville and sixteenth.
Seven men are shot, two fatally, in a restaurant at Fraser and Broadway.
The gangland massacre in Surrey.
The assasination of two gangsters at Granville and Seventieth and the suspected retaliations.
And of course, the latest internet viral craze, Robert Dziekanski's brutal death by taser at the hands of the RCMP.

There's really no point I'm trying to make with this post except to put forth my general mental state. What makes all this violence worse is that the location of the violence overlaps with my yearly, monthly and weekly routines. The victims are all people I share a very specific public space with. Likewise, these killings were commited by the apparatus of power that controls this space: gangs and the police.

This violence isn't new exactly. Much of my East Vancouver neighbourhood as a teenager was grow operations. I've woken up to the pop pop of a drive by and a SWAT teams in my backyard. At least three houses on our block had their front doors baterring rammed and their contents carried out in garbage bags. After the plants were removed from the house two doors down, the police dumped the agricultural equipment on the front lawn. My mom took some planters for her garden. Just yesterday I bought some milk at the local Hell's Angels run supermarket, Super Valu.

But somehow this latest stuff is more disturbing. I think it's because, while I'm never going to get wrapped up in gang violence (I hope), I can see myself in the face of Dziekanski or the animator suffering from depression gunned down by police for acting outside the rules of normal social behaviour.