In just a few days time, after much anticipation, my home town,
the H-hole, will be hosting the
G8 Summit.
The sleepy town of 18 thousand, which rarely has anything so exciting happen, is all in a kerfuffle. First there was all the infrastructure improvements that have been happening over the last year, but now the real ugly stuff is starting.
There are the security passes to give out to the people who live in the restricted zone, the temporary Tim Horton's to build inside
the resort where the summit is being held, the buses to organize for the resort staff to get to work and back, black bear training for all the security staff running around the woods, PR fun day for local kids and police in riot gear, and most conspicuous of all is the giant fence that is encasing several square kilometers resort, houses, roads, acres of bush and blocking off a main artery into town.
Since my parents live in the nearby village of Dwight, Mom and Dad's house will be cut off and they will have to take a rather circuitous route to get to the grocery store, but their story is not as bad as their friends Pam and Jamie. The fence goes right through their property cutting their house apart from their barn. They had "farm out" all their animals and shut down
their bed and breakfast.
The fence is chain link, about 10 feet high and held upright by concrete feet. It is meant to keep all the expected protesters a good distance away from the buildings where the summit will be held (and incidentally, where I went to prom). I must admit, the thing is almost laughable since the fence is very climbable. I suspect the local mosquito and black fly population will be a more effective deterrent for protesters. I guess the fence is more a symbol of the border between secure and non-secure areas than an actual fence.
The fence and all this extra security is a real thorn in the thumb of locals, but generally I think there is a sense of excitement, and resignation that it is a necessary evil for the few days of the summit. Nothing really bad has ever happened in Huntsville, but locals can imagine that the summit might draw outsiders to town and cause some real trouble.
But I thought I would put this in perspective for my Muskoka friends who might read this. Every day in Jerusalem, I have my ID checked and bag searched to get onto campus for work. My bag gets looked in when I go to the grocery store, the mall, the bank and even the McD's to get those tasty three shekel ice creams. I see large guns almost daily on people walking around on the streets. In order to get to work and support their families, thousands of people have to make their way through slow moving check points built like abattoirs, to get past a thirty foot concrete wall topped with half a dozen lines of razor wire.
No one really likes the wall and the security, but it is viewed by many as a necessary evil to prevent a repeat of bad things that have happened. Itzik tells me he knows someone who lost a leg in my grocery store when a suicide bomber blew herself up. The McD's I frequent is next to Ben Yehudah street- a favorite locale for terrorist bombs- and the other
university campus had a terrorist attack eight years ago that killed nine students in a cafeteria. And since that horrific wall has gone up, and security placed everywhere, the incidents of suicide bomber attacks has gone to near zero, to the point where I feel safe to move and live there for my post doc and invite my whole family for a visit.
Don't get me wrong, I loathe that wall and all the ugly truths about human nature it represents. Huntsvillians are getting a mere taste of what Jerusalem and the nearby occupied towns and cities is like every day.
So ask yourself this: what exactly are you willing to put up with as a necessary evil? Under what conditions? And for how long?
