Petition Failure

Gentle Reader, remember that petition I was circulating and nagging you to extinction about?  I started it about a month ago.  It was about asking the Prime Minister to make housing an essential human right.  I tried to send it everywhere, post it everywhere, I even began contacting all the Anglican Church parishes in Canada.  After sending emails to some three hundred churches, and not one single signature, it began to occur to me that no one would be interested in signing.  So, thirty-seven signatures later I've packed up shop and only hope that someone with better connections can pick up the torch from where I left it.  I feel disappointed, yes, but at least I have learned something of how selfish and callous a lot of Canadians really are about the homeless, especially Anglicans whom I consider to be the most selfish Christians on earth.

I am still going to make the issue known, of course, through this blog.  Neither am I above sending this post to all the selfish people, notably Anglicans, who couldn't be bothered because they really don't care, which is why I left that denomination.  One of them actually wrote back to say that I might get more signatures on the petition if I said shelter instead of housing.  I promptly wrote back to inform him that the word shelter conjures visions of a cramped room with rubber mats strewn on the floor.  If that's all the government was obligated to do then that's all they would have to offer.  But this fellow is from an older and privileged generation (yes, he is a straight white male, and one who lives very comfortably).  Instead of signing the petition he just said he'd think about it.  After that he had the colossal gall to send me that lying hagiography about President Elect Dump as a justification for supporting his presidency.  I have already blogged about that.  From a Christian?  Well, not really a Christian, but an Anglican, and a very typical one, all pious handwringing and sympathetic noises and token volunteer work, but still likely to blame the most vulnerable for their plight while going off to his choir practice.

One of the biggest obstacles to social justice in this country lies in the smug self-righteous indifference of too many Canadians.  Ironically, the hardest to convince are often those who came to this country as refugees and immigrants.  But they also have had all kinds of extra supports and encouragement that Canadian society denies its very own.  It's as though we are telling them, very judgmentally, that having been born and raised in this privileged land of opportunity and you still haven't been able to make it, then you deserve to rot and perish in the gutter somewhere.  It is a way of kicking someone who is already down and just leaving them to die.

I want to believe that Canadians are better people than that.  I don't have a lot of evidence and I am waiting to be proven wrong.

In the meantime, we are in the middle of a housing crisis that keeps on worsening.  More Canadians who a few years ago would never have dreamed of being in need are now having to choose between paying for food or rent or medications.  Our governments offer token responses but basically are doing nothing.  We have to start taking things into our own hands, but it looks like a lot of us are going to have to get very uncomfortable first and this is likely to happen pretty darn soon.