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Page added on May 21, 2014
Poverty and Silence
Under all our cheerful tallying of disasters there is always the one we don’t talk about: poverty. We can talk about overpopulation, resource depletion, climate change, political corruption, maybe even war, crime, epidemics, credit collapse, whatever, but in the coming years what the average person is going to be thinking about, first thing in the morning, is the sheer lack of money.
We’re not supposed to talk about it. Any other tabooed topic is now, at worst, framed in a jolly chuckle. Money is the only thing that still dwells in a cloud of euphemism: currency, assets, finance, but never “money,” heaven forbid. Yet a great many people who now see themselves as middle class are going to have to get used to living on peanut-butter sandwiches, or dandelion roots, or whatever else the “localized economy” can come up with. It’s simple arithmetic: too many people, and not enough of anything else.
This country, Canada, is probably one of the worst in the world at hypocrisy and denial. As a South American friend once told me, Canada specializes in “poverty behind closed doors.” I think many people would rather miss a meal than go downtown wearing old clothes. Sometimes that denial has its good side, of course: in an odd way, it can be pleasant to be living in a society where people have a habit of not speaking plainly. Too much plain talk can ruin a good day, and it may be better for people to learn, if ever, by looking in the mirror than by listening to other people.
But the waves of poverty are lapping further up the shore. I spend a lot of time in the library these days. I don’t have a job, but my remaining savings from the hell of the Middle East mean I can survive a few more months until my government pension begins — and I’ll just have to hope that pensions still exist over the next few years. But even if I had loads of money now I still think I’d be getting awfully bored with a day of which the high point is the cutting of my toenails — I think my body, over the years, has chemically adjusted to near-death experiences. So I walk downtown and kill a few hours of daylight. But the library is also the gathering place, as the staff keeps telling me, of “street people.”
Even getting here to the library is not easy, but that’s my choice. I have a nice car, so socializing with street people is only what is called “slumming it”; I can always go back into my cocoon, instead of getting some cardboard together and preparing for a night in a storm sewer. But I don’t want to drive my car. I just plain enjoy walking. From my apartment to the library is a nice 30-minute walk, and I see no reason to drive a car.
Yet I learned years ago that walking, in Canada, is a no-no. You will always be looked upon as a homeless person. So you have to learn how to play the game. You have to walk with an erect posture, because that is the clearest distinction between the classes — although actually I learned how to walk by de-constructing women’s assertiveness lessons. It’s hard, though, because the real “me” is more of a hunter or farmer, and such people know that studying the ground is more useful than studying the sky.
As a male, I mustn’t smile, and I mustn’t spend the day poking at an i-Phone, because both can get me into misunderstandings about sexual orientation. And I mustn’t squint, because that makes me look as if I’m accustomed to being slapped, and again that would be a point against me. The fact that my squinting comes from too much reading is no excuse. So that leaves me with the “blank look,” as a prison-guard friend tells me — I think it’s otherwise known as the “dog-face look.”
The downtown itself allows a bit of anonymity, thank God. It’s getting out of my actual neighborhood that’s hard. Except for me, no adult in my neighborhood would dream of leaving the house without getting into an automobile. It just isn’t done.
It’s also true that people in my neighborhood don’t talk to one other, a fact that is possibly duplicated in many other parts of the industrial world, perhaps something that’s been true for a long time. But I noticed, soon after moving here, that people in one house won’t talk to people in other houses. They’ll talk to their relatives who come for Sunday dinner, but they won’t talk to the people who live next door. If I walk down the street, I’m generally not allowed to say hello to anybody. The only people who say hello to me are people over eighty, who grew up in a saner world.
But this isolation will simply intensify the transformation of cities into death traps. The slow but steady squeeze of poverty is turning us all into misanthropes right at the point where we should be working together. There are community garden allotments in my neighborhood, but the prevalence of “No Trespassing” signs makes me wonder how much genuine “community” can be found in those vegetable patches. That same refusal to co-operate with neighbors was so visible to me in Nova Scotia: the province has plenty of arable land and a pleasant climate, if you ignore the heart-stopping storms, but people would rather leave the province than create a self-sufficient economy.
I enjoy sitting in the library, warmed by the bodies of the truly homeless, in spite of minor inconveniences. I’ve been nagged enough by the library staff that I will now take my notebook computer to the washroom with me whenever I need a pee. It’s little nuisances like those that keep me forever from being a socialist, though, beside the basic fact that I don’t feel morally inferior for not having fourteen children.
9 Comments on "Poverty and Silence"
GregT on Wed, 21st May 2014 8:01 am
“but in the coming years what the average person is going to be thinking about, first thing in the morning, is the sheer lack of money.”
Somehow, I very much doubt that. The average person doesn’t eat money.
paulo1 on Wed, 21st May 2014 9:01 am
re:
But even if I had loads of money now I still think I’d be getting awfully bored with a day of which the high point is the cutting of my toenails — I think my body, over the years, has chemically adjusted to near-death experiences.
As a Canadian, I hate it when idiots take their angst-filled lives and extrapolate it to include an entire country or race. I walk downtown, and I walk on my rural street. I actually talk to neighbours and speak to strangers. Many make eye contact and smile. I have found since retiring that there are not enough hours in the day to do all that I want to do.
This guy should trade in his free library computerized wordsmithing for a walk in a park and maybe some medication. If he goes to a hospital it won’t cost him anything…that is, if he doesn’t have a medical plan in this socialized ‘hell hole’.
Paulo
Plantagenet on Wed, 21st May 2014 11:56 am
Canada is one of the wealthiest nations on earth. This person has no idea what real poverty is—I suggest he travel to a poor area in a third world country and expand his frame of reference.
hculliton on Wed, 21st May 2014 2:57 pm
Plantagenet: I agree that Canada’s very well off. But even here there is rinsing poverty that the author rightly points out as being hidden in plain sight. I teach in a small Ontario town in a special ed high school program. The world I learn about from my students is fundamentally and vastly different from mine and it’s literally all around us. We in Canada do have pockets of poverty every bit as grinding as can be found almost anywhere. The really sad thing is that as wealthy we are, we still allow this blight to continue. Indeed, the plight of our indigenous people is a crime in it’s own right.
J-Gav on Wed, 21st May 2014 4:11 pm
Hey Paulo – I’m with you. Toe-nails are a bitch!
Also recently retired, I go through a lot of shoe leather – with a camera on board just for the hell of it.
Peter Goodchild (where is he? Toronto?)recently said in an article something like: “Don’t walk to places or smile at strangers, you’ll immediately be suspect.” I live in Paris, where people are notoriously self-centered, and I don’t find that to be the case.
If I take somebody’s picture – even when they don’t notice (which is usual as I’m a stealthy SOB), I often walk straight up to them and show it, engage in a conversation and 95% of the time everything goes fine. Sure, ya gotta be ready for that 5%, but with a little practice …
“Not enough hours” is exactly the way I live it too. I try to look at every one of them as precious.
J-Gav on Wed, 21st May 2014 4:19 pm
Well yeah, I realize this is Goodchild’s article (I originally read it on a different site), I just found it a bit weird that the only people he seems to be able to connect with are over-eighties! I have many exchanges with teen-agers, homeless people of all ages, even the occasional “business-person.”
WTAA? A smile and an open mind always helps in my experience.
kervennic on Wed, 21st May 2014 6:01 pm
@ Plantagenet
You are clearly not poor in an industrial country. The lifespan of a poor in Paris or London is pretty low.
In africa you survive with a tea shirt and light food. In europe you do not pass the first winter.
I survived a winter with 2 degrees in my house for a week because i could not afford to buy wood. I could barely wash or prepare food, everything was slow and painful. Life is tougher in the north for similar poverty in term of money.
Newfie on Wed, 21st May 2014 8:26 pm
Canada is a dangerous place to be without money in the dead of winter. It can be cold enough to freeze people to death who have to sleep outside. And you can’t pick mangoes and bananas off trees in January like you can in Third World countries. Just saying… – The man in Newfoundland.
GregT on Wed, 21st May 2014 9:36 pm
Plant,
I have travelled extensively, and have spent a great deal of time in areas of extreme poverty. The only thing that I can imagine worse, is being extremely impoverished while living in the midst of a very well to do society.
I have also been involved in charity work in the downtown east side of Vancouver, and have experienced first hand what these people are going through. You couldn’t imagine some of the stories that I could tell, even in your worst nightmares.