Not glamping

Seeing people living on city streets is nothing new. As long as people have been forced to earn money in order to survive, there have been those who haven’t been able to keep up. There have always been rich and poor and there has never been a solution, for various reasons.

As humans, there are many of us who only care about poverty when we’re poor, we only care about homelessness when we find ourselves without one, we are only concerned with health when it fails us, and so on. When we have money and a roof over our head, the stories of those that are in more difficult positions tend to just be stories, something to read, something to watch, to pass the time, to feel luckier than most.
For those who have nowhere to go, even if it’s for personal reasons, certain standards, as we know them, tend to lower to the extent of what’s available. I don’t believe that people who live in tents set up in public parks in urban centres are doing so for the pleasure of being in the great outdoors. Besides those who have fallen through the cracks of the mental health system, who probably used to be the majority of the homeless in the cities, there are scores of others who never thought they would find themselves in such a position.

Since the Covid pandemic in 2020, life has changed greatly for all of us. Inflation, (a kind of legal theft), has brought most of us down a few rungs on the quality-of-life ladder. Price rises continue to shock most people on a daily basis. Today, what we earn only goes a fraction of the distance that it did a handful of years ago. Many of us have managed to grin and bear it by changing some of our habits, or lowering our standards, but many couldn’t lower the bar any further. I can’t imagine what it’s like to lose your home, but I know that the decision to live in a tent in a city like Toronto couldn’t have been an easy decision for anyone who finds themselves in that position. Those who are managing to keep their lives together don’t like to see these situations, and that’s obvious.

Who likes to have the biproduct of the society we belong to mirrored back at them? We do much better when the problems are hidden away, so we can go about our routine without being reminded of what we are part of. It’s easy to state that living in a public park is illegal, parks are for everyone, they’re where we watch our children play, where we walk our dogs, where we bask in the sun on a summer day. But who needs the park more? What if you lost your home? Any idea what the shelters are like? Are we really convinced these people are pitched up on the grass out of choice?

Yeah, it looks terrible, but it’s a reminder of the problems the current system produces, and a reminder of all the talk-with-no-real-intent-to-resolve, to those who govern. Let’s face it, we feel a certain amount of guilt, don’t we? And if we don’t, we should.

Fiquem bem,

Raul Freitas/MS