The Legitimate Rage

Now we read reports this week of the number of homeless people doubling (tripling according to one report) in the last three years. With no changes in sight for welfare eligibility rules which may as well have been scripted by the Offices of Marley and Scrooge in their heyday, and people being hounded off welfare for slim breaches, there is real anger on the street, and sometimes rage. And they have damned good reason for becoming livid. Many of these individuals are becoming mentally ill from the circumstances of destitution. There are no streetworkers (or certainly not enough) to make a dent on this festering social ill. These people are being treated more often as though they are criminals but who ever declared it was a crime to be poor?

The self-serving union administrations (whose executives pay themselves very nearly what corporate executives can expect) are not reaching out to resolve this issue of inequity between the extremely poor and their membership. The attitude clearly resounds, “I’ve got mine and fuck you.” What their membership has got is a siege mentality created on the job site between the ownership/employer and the employees/members. Constant tension per day on the job. The brethren must be feeling righteously thankful for that.

And down on the corner find how the invisible bank policy makers back east are well guarded by their front end people, the tellers, who must enforce creepy policies which manage to find those invisible hands in our pockets for the most miniscule arrangements (i.e. the obscenely exorbitant ATM fees, or the fee for keeping a business account: $5./mo.).

Keep sniffing around our society and find more evidence of a moral malaise so entrenched, so insidious that it becomes impossible not to consider that these fixes are in so deep that any restoration of happy day-to-day living in an innocent state of just comfort is becoming a naïve and dismal fantasy.

The judicial system right here in civilized Canada has become so hugely bureaucratic and heavily lawyered with trillions of words to prevent the flow of justice that any hope of simple resolutions becomes laughable.

A substantial number in our police forces is suffering a kind of resigned depression as they attempt to wade through the paperwork and meander around legal roadblocks to securing or administering justice. Thanks to ‘privacy’ laws and the rights of the individual superceding the rights of our society, we can have no reasonable expectation of getting at the bad guys when we know or suspect with good cause where the evildoing is being done.

It’s exasperating and this current state of affairs is threatening to unravel the whole social weave. And there is no leadership across the board here that seems intent on doing anything real to respond to this emerging and drastic situation. The mayor is very pleased to pose for photographs. He smiles well and is mentioned often in society columns but this human decay is happening on his watch. While his political agenda is pleasingly working out and he repolishes his image ad nauseum, the duty to act and defend the helpless remains his.