Sad Stories

I like Barbara Ehrenreich's writing. I liked her books Nickel and Dimed about working class poverty and Bait and Switch about middle class desperation. We have enough problems of our own here in Canada, but I was affected by everything in Erenreich's "CommonDreams" article: "Nickel and Dimed (2011 Version): On Turning Poverty into an American Crime" especially this story:

The report lists America’s ten “meanest” cities -- the largest of which include Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Orlando -- but new contestants are springing up every day. In Colorado, Grand Junction’s city council is considering a ban on begging; Tempe, Arizona, carried out a four-day crackdown on the indigent at the end of June. And how do you know when someone is indigent? As a Las Vegas statute puts it, “an indigent person is a person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive” public assistance.

That could be me before the blow-drying and eyeliner, and it’s definitely Al Szekeley at any time of day. A grizzled 62-year-old, he inhabits a wheelchair and is often found on G Street in Washington, D.C. -- the city that is ultimately responsible for the bullet he took in the spine in Phu Bai, Vietnam, in 1972.

He had been enjoying the luxury of an indoor bed until December 2008, when the police swept through the shelter in the middle of the night looking for men with outstanding warrants. It turned out that Szekeley, who is an ordained minister and does not drink, do drugs, or cuss in front of ladies, did indeed have one -- for “criminal trespassing,” as sleeping on the streets is sometimes defined by the law. So he was dragged out of the shelter and put in jail.

“Can you imagine?” asked Eric Sheptock, the homeless advocate (himself a shelter resident) who introduced me to Szekeley. “They arrested a homeless man in a shelter for being homeless?”

Aw sure. It sounds bad, but ... BUT WHAT? Was this an isolated incident? Was this an aberration? It can't be. Drafting soldiers, or relying on poverty or misguided patriotism to make individuals "choose" to become cannon fodder is all part and parcel of the same system that creates homelessness amidst plenty and then penalizes it, in order to force the non-homeless to do whatever it takes to avoid it.

But it's all needless, and inhuman, and must be condemned. Yesterday I linked to this story and I'm linking to it again, because it just goes to show how low Canada has sunk that the richest, biggest city in one of the richest countries in the world, has succumbed to the same brain-dead, inhuman stupidity, to elect a rancid slab of rat fat like Rob Ford.

And, the sad fact of the matter is, we're more evil than that. We, as a country, as a people, gave a majority government to a piece of shit that defunded "Sisters in Spirit." And, now, when there's an inquiry into how the police missed the boat on a guy who killed at least 33 women, the provincial government is refusing to fund the lawyers who would allow various groups to participate in it.

Is there a pattern here? Is capitalism a system with serious shortcomings in the humanity department? Of course it is.