Where People Become Dirty Words ...

Welcome to the gentrification of the nation’s poorest urban neighborhood. Around here we’ll not tolerate men or women in their 60’s or 70’s standing on the sidewalk in the pouring rain outside of our fashionable eateries and gourmet coffee shops asking for change. Around here we have every right to tell them to move along, and if they won’t do it there’s always the private security firm that the business association has hired to come and make them.

Never mind their Charter rights, and who cares that that private security firm doesn’t actually possess the authority to do it – people like that are just blemishes on this otherwise world class city of ours.

Can you imagine what would happen if a private security guard came up to some yuppie in Yaletown and told them to move along? Well, you don’t have to worry about it, because it’ll never happen. It doesn’t matter where they’re standing, they clearly possess the financial resources to afford to stand there, and therefore have the luxury of being able to enjoy those rights that are supposedly applicable to every Canadian.

People throw shit around when it comes time to put a shine on this democratic paradise of ours. They evoke the memory of those that fought and died to preserve this ever undermined, exploitative, and decaying way of life of ours. But you know, that old man standing in the rain once held a rifle in his hands, on his shoulder a Canadian flag was sewn. Even though he didn’t know it at the time, he was fighting for the right to beg in the street. So who the fuck are any of us to tell him that he can’t?

You never know the reason why. You just see what you want to see. That old woman smells and looks disgusting. She was beaten by her husband for years and eventually found herself in Riverview after he died because she’d long since broke with reality. And when they closed Riverview down she found herself in a halfway house, spending parts of her day wandering streets that, as a young women, she never thought she would. But life has a cruel way of dealing bad hands, so she wanders almost invisibly through this urban theatre - a spectacle, a repulsion, a reminder to those that don’t want to think about it that life isn’t always fair and that there just might be something behind those empty eyes that justifies it all.

Reality is not something that people like to be confronted with, despite the fact that we live in what is commonly thought a voyeuristic society. As we watching the drama of the rich and famous unfold, the blatant exploitation of those that suffer from an immense lack of self esteem, we forget that outside our doors reality is waiting, and that it’s ugly.

Maybe she’s in her late teens, maybe he’s in his early twenties. They both look like drug addicts – that’s because they are drug addicts. Maybe she was sexually abused, maybe right up until the day that she got up the courage to run. Maybe he was sexually abused, maybe he was beaten, maybe both of them suffer from mental illnesses that their families, for whatever reason, didn’t want to deal with. They sit or stand alone, maybe on some corner, a receptacle in front of them looking to be filled with pocket change. It’ll be used to buy drugs most likely, and therefore a brief escape. One step closer to death, one more night in the arms of euphoric distraction.

Angels wait to welcome the dispossessed into heaven while on earth the power to slow the traffic rests in the hands of those that refuse to work for free. Salvation, they say, rests in the belief of belief itself. Thank God for that because charity’s become too expensive.

--Matthew Good