Thursday 28 November 2019
Faeces and the politics of cultural resistance
When
inequality gets unbridgeable, aspiration impossible and enclosure shrinks urban spaces ever tighter, the excluded strike back. And let there be no doubt, exclusion is the key, whether physical, social or psychological. Recent
events in Toronto, where an immigrant is reported to have thrown fecal matter at educated targets in
university libraries has drawn horror and disgust in the mainstream media. But
the real story is not about faeces, which many homeless on the street live with
24/7/365. No, the real stories are the excluded thrower's resentment at societal “winners”
and the reasons for it. Understanding these reasons has no place in most mainstream coverage to date, but a growing sense of exclusion is probably at the
root of it. Better get used to it, as class warfare explodes in our continuingly neoliberal times. The faeces serve as a
fitting symbol. If neglect continues who knows who may be
the next target of the resented?
Wednesday 27 November 2019
Things getting worse for the homeless in Toronto - says Cathy Crowe.
It is 2019 in a rich country called Canada, tent cities like the ones under the Gardiner Expressway above are appearing around urban centres, and in a recent cold spell two of our homeless neighbours recently died outside in Toronto, our largest city. TorontotheBetter's Nov.26th conversation with homelesss advocate Cathy Crowe identified the realities of life in today's Toronto. Along with the explosion of heftily priced condos more people in the city are in need of any home at all and for those who suffer the consequences of homelessness insitutional reponders, are simply put, less than responsive. Shawn, Paul and others in attendance who told us of their own periods of homelsssness know first hand how quickly lives can collapse when stable, afforable accommodation is unavailable, while Tyler expressed his sense of feeling invisible to many of those he had to interact with in this circumstance. The truth is that the homeless are caught in traps at both ends of what Cathy has called the de-housing process. The base-level problem is that there are not enough affordable homes and waiting lists are growing, while those living homeless then suffer not only ill health but lack of empathy as well as stigma. To make matters even worse, popular resistance in the form of improvised shelters, aka tent cities, are being demolished and political support has waned where once it was stronger, at least in some quarters.
Videos of Cathy's TorontotheBetter presentation and our ensuing conversation will soon be available on this blog. To be notified about when they are please send an email to postmaster@torontothebetter.net with "emergency" in the subject line. How can we hasten the action on homelessness that is all too obviously required? Time for the city to declare an emergency, said Cathy, as was previously done a decade or so ago, when homelssness was formally identified by activists,including some TorontotheBetter workers, as just as much a disater as those environmentally and conflict generated. To join the homelessness resistance struggle with Cathy, Health Providers Against Poverty and others, sign the petition declaring homelssness an emergency at www.change.org.
Wednesday 13 November 2019
Cathy Crowe in conversation with friends - Nov.26,2019 11.45am 720 Bathurst St.
As a street nurse, Cathy has been the driving force in raising awareness about the shameful crisis of homelessness in Canada and will answer questions from TorontotheBetter and our guests on Tuesday Nov.26 from 12 noon to 1pm at the home of the Centre for Social Justice, 720 Bathurst Street, Toronto in Meeting Room #1(2nd Floor). Discounted copies of Cathy's book will be available at the interview and questions may be submitted ahead of time to postmaster@TorontotheBetter.net.
Monday 4 November 2019
Business for a better world? The good, the bad and the ambiguous
When old certainties crumble what fills the vacuum is often reminiscent of poetic horrors that shamble towards Bethlehems of various kinds. Mainstream capitalism, wounded by its near catastrophic failure in the Great Recession of 2008 noted the bad press that went with its lastest failure and reached out for makeovers that positioned it as friends of the people. From A&W to Walmart with several stops in between and alongside them many for-profit enterprises now expend much of their capital, both financial and social, to convince the buyers that fund them that they are actually not as single-mindedly self-interested as many thought. At TorontotheBetter we call this trend "cred appropriation" and, in its most extreme form, cred expropriation, suctioning up the ideas and values validated by social movements that did the hard work of campaigning for causes. What's an innocent consumer to do with mega corporations shouting out their environmental empathy and their love of small children, dogs and grannies (of course)? Be very afraid, we argue, These late coming social consciences simultaneously decry the taxation and accountability are the necessary coniditions of any serious attempt to right the wrongs of inequality and environmental catastrophe that scourge our world from east to west and back. Without a coherent politics there can be no redemptive change. Enterprise, like civic society, can play roles, but wishing and half measures will not get us where we have to go.
