There are always those trying to pour concrete over the places that poor people call home. In toronto, where a fallace and a scrotum serve as monuments, this is especially true. There is seldom any dignity in architecture and other such conveyors of hearth and heart. Ask the residents of Tent City, who erected a community of the hapless, evicted by Home Depot thugs and apathy. They’ll tell you: no land on Turtle Island is safe from thieves who steal as a mode of governance. Keep fighting, keep struggling against a tide that recedes condos and box stores, developments. And then there’s the stadiums.
Where i grew up there was always a reason to run, especially to run away. Away from cops, the bitch in school promising she would cut you, everything that the kids said about you behind your back. Away from fathers, ranting and brandishing homegrown weapons like bats, brooms and kitchen knives. What have you.
It wasn’t until i got to the University of Toronto that i realized rich white bitches didn’t have this. They had functional families, the cops didn’t harass. They didn’t have any reason to run except for the sport. So they constructed reasons, wound powder stained rivers of dirt through the campus, erected hurdles. But they never want to forget that it isn’t real. This is where the stadiums come in, just about.
When i came to the UofT i was a troubled kid with a lot on her mind and a lot weighing down on the shoulders. i was in a no good marriage that amounted to indentured servitude, i was estranged from abusive parents and, worst of all, i had bigfuckingmouth syndrome. It was madness. i was too smart and brown to get a political science degree without a target on my back. Amerikkka invaded Iraq, gentrification invaded Regeant Park then Parkdale, i was in no mood to sit on my hands and watch.
The good news is that there were others. The bad news is that they never stopped trying to pave us over, erase us, with their stadiums and the dusted tracks used to demarcate us and them. Us = Association of Part-Time Undergraduate Students (APUS) – overwhelmingly poor, colored and woman. Starting with the Athletics Center, then the Varsity, there was a never a stadium that didnt belong where we were trying to exist. Again and again, here came the stadiums, now come the Pan-American Games.
You may have heard that many torontonians coming together to say no to the Pan-American Games in toronto. You might join them because we are on stolen land to begin with or because the whole world is watching Vancouver torn apart by the 2010 Olympics. You may join them because because you’re like i was, looking for something to belong to, you might find it with these people or you might not. You may join them because twice torontonians have successfully prevente the games from coming (1996 and 2008), because it’s the right thing to do, because you want to be a part of something that staves off the cold concrete of stadiums on the backs of poor people until the next time comes around.
