Living With Trauma: The Healers, 33

Time is of the essence, if we are to make progress for the casualties of our housing crisis. While, admirably, our federal government has come forward with a new national housing strategy, nothing gets set in motion for another two years, giving our homeless two more Canadian winters to have to get through. This is outrageously slow and our Prime Minister Silver-Spoon-In-Mouth, having absolutely no clue what it must be like to have to live in anything less than three homes (or does he live in four?), is probably never going to get it. He is a privileged rich boy who will never understand what it is like to be poor, marginalized, and desperate. Like most of our elected leaders. They don't have a single idea what it's like to be on the margins. Had any of them our kind of lived experience then it is pretty unlikely that they would have made it as far as they have, though from time to time it probably does occur. Still, I don't know of one single politician who has ever had lived experience of homelessness, and or mental illness, and or addiction, though this latter could be a moot point, since alcohol and porn are also every bit as addictive as crack cocaine. But here I digress. No one seems to get that we are living in a huge crisis right now. This is a human rights emergency. All those people sleeping in low barrier shelters and on the streets really should have all had housing yesterday, last week, last month, fifteen years ago! our social fabric is shredded and torn in so many ways. Right now I am hearing something on the radio about people who are alone at Christmas, a huge elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about, but after years of nagging the CBC they are for a change doing as I tell them and now they are talking about it. But it isn't just because this city is cliquey and full of narcissists but for one other reason. The social and economic inequality is beginning to resemble Old World Britain and Continental Europe. The aristocracy are the moneyed property owners, and we are the peasants and serfs. And it is the moneyed property owners who are running everything and calling the shots, even in our more progressive political parties. There is going to be a long and hard struggle towards social and economic equality in this country and especially in this rainy offshore paradise called Vancouver. In the meantime, we coexist, though many are leaving this city now because they can no longer afford to live here. We have to keep fighting. I think people need to be educated, that many of the well off folk, especially if they're recent immigrants, really don't have a clue about our social issues, and many don't want to know but this has to be shoved in their faces and we are going to stay in their face and we are going to continue to organize, struggle, resist and fight until we have regained every inch of ground that has been lost to the kind of corporate greed that is swallowing our nation alive and maybe one day we will achieve something that resembles social equality. In the meantime, the struggle. This will make us stronger and this will educate others, especially the young, whose idealism will only be an asset to our moving forward.