Nuance 6

As some of you know, Gentle Reader, I attend an Anglican parish church in south Kerrisdale, which is rather a wealthy neighbourhood full of respectable burghers. Nothing at all wrong here. We get along very well and I am finding with those lovely people a sense of growing community. Go figure! We, like many Anglicans, and other Christians of good faith and good will, are concerned about homelessness and the increasing gulf between haves and have-nots in our country. Being a have-not, myself, having me among them is going to be, at times, quite the learning curve...for all of us. But they help where they can, and we want to grow in what we can do and be in order to serve and help bring justice for the poor. Following the coffee time after the Sunday eucharist yesterday, we gathered to talk about ideas for helping newcomers incorporate more into our community. Somehow the Jehovah's Witnesses came up briefly in the conversation, and I mentioned a particularly disturbing optic. I have seen this many times over while out in the city. You will see two nicely dressed Jehovah's Witnesses flanking their little stand full of literature and other propaganda and maybe one or two metres away on the sidewalk, someone sleeping under a blanket or begging for money. There is absolutely no contact between them and the JW's appear to not even know that they're there. This is sad, of course, and it really makes me angry. I would say something, but those people are usually already so steeped in their ignorance and brainwashing, (and yes, the Jehovah's Witnesses are a cult, and I think a particularly dangerous cult) that it would be tantamount to hitting a child. They also need help, help getting out of that pernicious organizatin that has nothing to do with the principals of the Christian faith and everything to do with aggrandizing and bolstering their own organization. They have zero interest in helping the poor and I have just read on the internet that the JW's idea of helping the poor is in preaching to them about their distorted version of the Christian faith and that then they will make all the right choices that will get them out of destitution and poverty and turn them into clean-cut and productive workers. If only it were so simple. And it isn't just the JW's. I have heard Christians, conservative, fundametnalist evangelicals and Pentecostals, say more or less the same thing. I remember when there were guest speakers, a missionary couple visiting a Pentecostal church I was involved in many years ago back in 1981 or so. They were talking about their ministry work in Venezuela. I had just in the last couple of years become particularly interested and involved with peace and social justice activism, so I asked them about the poor and what was being done to help bring social and economic justice to the many impoverished peoplke in that country. The wife of the couple gave a smug and sanctimonious smile and replied in a very sweet voice that the people in that country are poor because they make poor lifestyle choices. once they become converted and turn into proper born-again Christians, they always turn their lives around and lift themselves out of poverty. If only it were so simple. I just kept my mouth shut, knowing it would be futile to argue with an idiot in a room where I was most likely to be outnumbered, anyway. With what is going on in Venezuela, the spotlight is not on the many poor who have been helped by some of the redistribution policies of Hugo Chavez, but of the now poor and starving members of the middle class. Yes, it is appalling that poverty has become so widespread in what was once, with Argentina, considered the richest country in South America. But when they talk about a country being rich, never is anything said about the poorest citizens whom, in the case of Venezuela, traditionally make up half the population. It is as though they don't even exist, and if they are poor it is their own fault, systemic and political injustice be damned! We have to start seeing everyone in the picture, and not just focus on the ones who are the most like us, or whose values fit our own middle class ethos of greed, individualism and competition. I, for one, am glad that Victor Maduro is on his way out, but with Juan Guaidó all but set to take the reins of power, all going well, I still shudder for the poorest Venezuelans, the camposinos and the low income workers who have always been marginalized and have seen so little justice in their lives. I am waiting to see if the many countries supporting this transition of power will at least give a thought and a kind word about the poorest citizens of Venezuela. I am not holding my breath, Gentle Reader.