Surviving The Fall, 52

What happens to us who don't make it? Those in the stats who give up looking for work? Those who never quite make it at that dream job, that dream home, those dream cars, that dream spouse and dream kids, and those dream vacations in luxurious tropic resorts? Well, we can be seen almost everywhere, even if we are treated as invisible. We are sitting on the pavement begging for spare change in front of your favourite nail salon. We are scrounging bins and garbage cans for unwanted food behind your favourite bistro. We are wandering the streets yelling in unmedicated frenzies, nightmares and euphorias, we are banging drugs into our veins in the back alley behind your favourite shoe store. We are in many other places, too. We are pushing shopping carts full of empties and our only worldly possessions, we are sleeping on the sidewalk, under the bridge, in tent cities, in the park, we are taking one of those walks over the bridge, wondering if this will be the night when we will plunge into the icy waters and end it all. We are in shelters, low barrier shelters, we are sleeping on the couches or in the garages or back yards of friends. Some of us sleep in our cars, if we have them. Or on the bus. Or in a bus shelter. Or in Tim Horton's. One of us recently died there. We are in other places. We populate mental health group homes. Some of us are lucky to live in subsidized social housing. Some of us even find real jobs and manage to cobble together a decent living, though always living under the vaguely foul-smelling shadow of stigma. Some of us work in low-paying and meaningless jobs, hoping that we can scrape enough money together for the tuition and extra job and vocational training that will get us just a little bit ahead, perhaps to even have our own apartment, since owning your own place in this city is a pipedream for the very well-incomed. We were born here. We have come here from other countries. Far too many of us are aboriginal, and having lived in this land for hundreds of generations, we deserve much better, many of us are the white offspring of the settler cultures, and we are particularly despised because we didn't make it. We didn't take full advantage of so-called white privilege, not because we were lazy, and not because we couldn't be bothered, but because we were already exhausted and broken down from lives of poverty, abuse and social disadvantage. I also forgot to mention those who fill our remand jails and penitentiaries, and people stranded in survival sex work, and the women whose remains still have not been identified on Picton's pig farm. So many of us end up being blamed for our misfortunes by the more fortunate, who simply don't or don't want to imagine that they just might live in a world that is neither just or fair, because who wants to live with guilt? So, we still haven't answered the question. Who are we? I have told you where many of us can be found. But who are we? What are we, besides human refuse, the parts that can't be made to fit into the machine, and therefore must be discarded? It is sad, and so deeply tragic, that the rest of the world is never going to know just what they have lost with us: all that human potential, all that beauty of soul, those gifts, that fine sensitive intelligence, that spiritual awareness, that prophetic voice, all is lost because we have been discarded and because we have never been able to keep up with the merciless pace of capitalism, we have been left behind, we who have gifts of insight, discernment, sensitivity and beauty that the rest of you had might as well be spared because this really is casting pearls before swine. but as long as we are viewed through the lens of stigma and rejection and disability, you are never going to see how great a loss this is for you and the rest of the world, and how many of you are really aware that you also might be just one bad troll comment on social media away from a fall? Or less than one chequebook away from the food bank? We are all in this together and most of you would prefer to ignore us because instinctively I think that you all know just how fragile your lovely little lives really are.