The homeless population, a fact of urban life across North America, is only the most glaring symptom of a deeper problem.
So it’s not just a matter of telling them to get jobs. Or filling up the jails. Or legalizing or not legalizing drugs.
It’s about creating a society that people want to contribute to. It’s about creating a society that people don’t want to escape from and give up on.
People living on the street don’t all want to be the villains of society. Like James Munro who rescued people involved in the downtown explosion last month, most would rather help the cause.
But what is the cause?
When John F. Kennedy said, “ask not what your country can do for you- ask what you can do for your country,” there was a second part we don’t remember: it was to ask “what together we can do for the freedom of man.”
The appeal was to something bigger than simply your government and country. It was to the lofty ideals of freedom, liberty, and I would add, our happiness. Those should be the goals we strive for in unified purpose.
But the underlying goal of what government does today is pretty much shareholder value for the few.
Where once the goal of government was to look after the little guy, the goal for the past half century has been to look after the big guy.
The “investor good” became the rallying cry of the government, not the “public good.”
The shallow objective of society nowadays is nothing more than making the investor class as much money as they can possibly make. To achieve this, we have transformed housing into an investment vehicle and morphed competitive capitalism into a not-so-competitive rigged economy of planet-consuming mega corporations and monopolies.
There is no organized political movement to challenge the growing inequality and our leering precarity.
Where once the labour union movement fought the corporations for the betterment of our manual labourers, the factory workers, and craftspeople, the most powerful labour unions now mostly look after a more privileged class, the public sector workers, whose pensions are deeply enmeshed with this investor class.
What’s good for the investor is now good for the unions, despite some well-intentioned labour movement shareholder activism.
What we are seeing on our streets is a manifestation of this deeper directionless, where the greater good no longer exists. Where we don’t even know what the good is. All we know is the wheels of society roll for the elite, not us.
Is that a good enough reason to get up in the morning and go to work and pay exorbitant rent?
I think for the growing number of us living in homeless camps, the answer is no.
James Steidle is a Prince George writer.
