STORY posted on February 13, 2010 by Wrighter

Morning Routine: Coffee, Brush Teeth, Smash Capitalism

Corporate Heart Attack displays growing solidarity

by Paul Kitz

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Friday night's peaceful rally and march to BC place was an astounding success and a great display of solidarity. According to Cynthia Oka “it's also really important to have days of action where people can be autonomous in terms of how to express their dissent... and to just really be in solidarity with each other knowing that we do have the same goals and to be respectful of that."

Saturday morning's Corporate Heart Attack event, calling on a diversity of tactics to be employed in clogging some of the city's main arteries downtown, was an incredible demonstration of how far that solidarity extends. Present in the march from Thornton Park were banners from the Council of Canadians, Gatewaysucks.org and even PETA, groups who do not generally engage in property destruction, flying alongside the black of the Black Bloc and the Anti Poverty Committee.

When asked why she was there, Giselle, one of the protestors, expressed that "this isn't just about sports, it's about the destruction the olympic machine carries through different communities." Well, saturday morning it was protestors' turn to carry destruction into the corridors of commerce downtown. As Barry Kayde put it; “today's a day to fuck shit up a bit and disturb business as usual...this obviously isn't a 'building the alternatives' day, we'll do that tonight.” When asked why he employs the tactics he does Barry replied that "the idea of militancy, in and of itself, displays a degree of commitment to what we're talking about and also cranks up the heat on decision makers and power holders who have to recognize that there are insurrectionary tendencies within the broader social justice movement, and those are growing. As we saw [at friday's rally] there's more and more support for that from the more mainstream movement.”

Cynthia Oka is one of those people who would not participate in property destruction. Her chosen mode of disobedience is to “[use her] body as witness. That's part of the risk of today...we're expecting a severity of force so we're coming equipped with gas masks...It fucking sucks that we have to do this to exercise our civil liberties and our human rights...but we do."

As for Barry Kayde, he holds no naive belief that the average Olympic-goer will have an epiphany at seeing their action and join them in the streets. In a bittersweet comment that is heavy in truth, he states that “most people know shits pretty fucked up out there and just don't feel like it's their responsibility. It's just not good enough. Things won't get better until those people start waking up."

That being said Cynthia hopes that people who witness the Corporate Heart Attack will see “that there's a lot of creativity in the activist movement. There's a lot of diversity. There's a lot of roads for people to plug in.

The brave people who hit the streets (and corporate sponsors) and faced an army of riot cops are already looking to the future. In the words of one of the medics present “We hope that a resistance movement will continue on after. Instead of the Olympic Resistance Network we hope to have just the Resistance Network."