Whenever I start to think about it, I start to get a little mad.
Not crazy mad. Not yelling mad. Quiet mad. Like, when your eyes start to narrow down and lock on the distance, when you can feel the lines in your mouth pull tight. Like those times when even your friends start to back away and talk real, real careful.
PARC is a community. Think of us as a tribe. Like any other tribe, we grow larger with birth and new members. Like any tribe, we become smaller when a PARC member dies. We feel the pain and the loss in our lives because we are made smaller, made poorer.
Too many of our people have died this year. More than the national average for Canada. More than the city average for Toronto. More than the neighbourhood average, even for Parkdale. More of us at PARC are dying than should be dying. This year.
I can think of many reasons why PARC members die. Natural causes. Bad diet and bad drugs, both prescription and non-prescription. The constant dangers of living beside the illicit drug traffic and the sex trade, the violence growing like weeds in the cracked and broken dirt of city poverty. Too many cigarettes, too little exercise.
Too little love and hope and caring and attention, and too damn few reasons to keep trying to pull it together, to keep struggling to build a life worth pride and love and simple self-respect. All of these cause hurt and damage, and eventually, kill our people.
Depression and despair are natural to anyone who lives a life of low status and low income in this city, and the pain hits hardest in the murky, bottom-feeding world of welfare, FBA, food bank and social assistance. People see the problem on the street, and too often say "the government should do something about that" and walk right on past.
But the governments of Ontario and Toronto, our governments, are caught in a triple squeeze this year: 1) a "free" trade that has cost the city and province thousands and thousands of jobs; 2) a worldwide recession, which has hammered at government tax income and sent the demand for social services to the sky, and 3) a smaller amount of money given back from the federal tax income of the Canadian government in Ottawa.
We can't expect more help or more money from empty wells. PARC must begin
to try to work on it's own. We must start to face our real problems, start
to invent real solutions that work for us, on our own. We have to try
harder now, just to save the precious lives of our own people.
The last conversation I had with Mitch Campbell keeps coming back to mind.
I talked with Mitch over a morning coffee in the back of the PARC Building
Office. He told me he wanted to work, he told me he wanted to earn more
money. A few days later, he was dead.
I made the poster telling PARC members about the time and the location of Mitch's funeral. I never, never, ever want to do that again. But in this hard year of 1993, I sometimes find myself looking around the Drop-in and wondering, who will be next?
And when I think about that, I start to get a little mad. Quiet mad. Real
mad.
Let us continue to honour and to mourn our dead, just as any tribe does,
with our public sorrow and our private grief. And let us start to think,
and start to talk, and start to plan; and let us be very real with each
other.
And real, real careful.