Let The Real Games Begin

Last Sunday I attended the 2nd Annual Poverty Olympic in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The was live music, skits depicting the real kind of games being played on poor, mascots (Itchy the Bedbug, Chewy the Rat) and provocative presentations. For those who could not attend, here are some highlights:

Cost of Richmond Speed Skating Oval = $178 million
Cost of for increasing welfare by 50% for 5 years for all 25, 115 single parent 2 children families = <$66 million

Cost of Whistler Nordic Centre = $122 million
Cost to build ten 64 bed treatment centres with detox beds and transitional housing unit = $109 million

Cost of Olympic building and Trade & Convention Centre & RAV line = $6.044 billion
Number on waitlist for subsidized housing in BC = 9,909
Number of social housing units that $6.044 billion could build = 30,220

You can check out more here.

For me, the highlight of the afternoon’s events was watching a player dressed in a business suit with horns (looking as though he walked right off the cover of The Corporation) get an old school ass-kicking by two young school children. It was, in a word, awesome. I got so caught up in the performance that I forgot to take a picture.

I met some really great, engaged people and had some interesting conversations about security culture and the cost of the Vancouver’s 2010 Olympic Shames. I also saw Zig Zag (an artist I featured in a post last year entitled If You Stand for Nothing) and some of his newest work.

The Poverty Olympic made effective use of satire and comedic social commentary (truly dying arts) to show what a joke the 2010 Games really is.

Fuck this corporate circus.

Fuck the billion dollar security tab for a two week party for the rich.

Fuck the 2010 Games.

The are not the celebration of the human spirit and do nothing to further our creative evolution as a species.