What´s Next? 18

It seems that we are all living in a rather uneasy state of limbo right now.  We are having a near cessation of cases of covid, here in BC, and there have been no recorded deaths in more than a week now.  This does not make us any more comfortable.  A friend just mentioned that a lot of people are out buying covid puppies.  They are getting dogs to help them cope with the anxiety, and there is the possibility that the animal shelters will soon be overflowing with unwanted pets.  This is so like human consumer nature.  Reach for the first comfort.  Doesn't matter if it's on four legs or if it can be poured from a bottle.  We are all so fragile.  We want to be respected and talked to like adults, but so few of us seem prepared to actually be adults.  Pathetic.  Many of us have not matured beyond indignant five year olds screaming "You're not the boss of me!"

In the meantime, homelessness festers, the homeless fester on the doorsteps of the festering NIMBY's who don't want them in their gentrifying neighbourhoods, but are just going to have to put up and shut up because they helped create the problem and there was homelessness in their lovely edgy downtown neighbourhoods long before they bought into living there.  And I don't see any of them lifting so much as a professionally  manicured finger to help the vulnerable people who end up shitting on their doorsteps because of the lack of public toilets in this city.  Well, we all have to go sometime, eh?

And I also have sympathy for NIMBY's.  I live next door to a building full of hard to house tenants.  It is owned and managed by the city of Vancouver, and many of the tenants have been homeless.  Yes, some of them are annoying, they play their music too loud, and they are messy, but I would rather suffer through the inconvenience and discomfort than see them turned back out onto the street.

Many are hoping this pandemic will make us more compassionate.  I hope so.  We badly need housing solutions, but for that to happen we also need broad public support and political will.   If it is so easy to build condo towers to house the well-incomed, why is it rocket science to build affordable housing for all those who need it, to create a ministry of BC Housing writ large, where no one has to pay more than thirty percent of their income for housing no matter where they happen to be living?

Fifty years of neoliberal economics and politics has created a very ugly fallout.  Will it take more than a pandemic to put this in reverse?  Time will tell.