Shouldn't do it to a dog ...

The outrage du jour in British Columbia lately has been the slaughter of sled dogs by a sled-dog tour operator in Whistler. Apparently, these dogs were deemed expendable when the company experienced a downturn after the initial post-Olympics surge in business.

It's a horrifying case, both in and of itself and also in the exercise in "rush to judgment". There's been this outpouring of anger -- including death threats -- against the company, the person who did the killing (who's just been granted worker's compensation benefits for post-traumatic stress disorder) and the Olympic games; there's even been a Facebook page set up (oooh! a Facebook page! Now they're really in trouble!)

Interestingly, none of this outrage seems to be directed at the general public - the tourists who created a perceived demand for this service in the first place. It's a little like demanding Big Macs and Quarter-Pounders and then complaining that the South American forests have been destroyed to increase beef cattle lands.

Mind you, God is not impressed, either: A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel. (Proverbs 12:10 KJV)

(Reading this, Temple Grandin is definitely more in line with the will of God than most animal-rights activists: reputedly, one of her key observations about cattle management was that in dying, animals provide us with food, so we have to treat them with respect while they're alive. But I digress ...)

But one of the sidebars to this outrage has been people pointing to the lack of outrage when it comes to inhumane efforts against people -- like the deaths of 21 children who were under the care of the Ministry of Children and Families. The province's Child Advocate identified those, and I can tell you, there wasn't anywhere near the public outcry over that than there has been over the dogs.

And let me add this to the mix: where is the outrage over the human condition on Vancouver's Skid Road? Why have so many Christians, who are called to reach out to the poor and destitute, abrogated that responsibility and handed it off to a vast socio-political experiment in not-so-benign neglect? Solutions like harm-reduction and mixing affordable and market housing run counter to the will of God:

• mixed-use housing is not a bad idea, per se, but as I pointed out in my previous post, it keeps drug addicts in the very area where their problems are all around them. They need to move -- like Abram was instructed by God -- to a different place, so they can move towards the promise God as for them
• (it also provides developers an excellent opportunity to promise an affordable housing component in their plans and then, when sales go sideways -- as happened with Olympic Village -- cry poverty and demand to be released from their promise)
• as I've said numerous times before, Jesus was not into harm reduction; He was (and still is) into harm elimination -- total healing, not just band-aids
• drug advocates rail that the US "War on Drugs" has been a failure, but the peace treaty with drugs we have in this society has led to the problems on Skid Road today -- the reason why people are terrified of walking through the area between Chinatown and Gastown. Neither works, because of the spirit behind them: the spirit of a "quick fix".
• The US approach is to try to drop the Monty Python 16-ton weight on the drug industry;
• the approach we see in Canada is to make life easier for the addicts: lots of social housing, clean needles and a "safe place to shoot up";
• the court system fails to back up law enforcement officers;
• the news media glamorize pushers by publicizing the dollar value of drug seizures and printing photos of gang leaders who look like they belong more in GQ than Hotel Crowbar

The devil provides quick fixes; God provides solutions.

God's solution involves recognizing that drug addicts and the mentally ill are fallen human beings like all of us -- everyone has a different response mechanism and theirs has involved a more spectacular crash. It's the duty before God for all of us to reach out with love and hope that overpower the need for the drugs.

I'm not just talking about the addicts. I grieve for the dealers and enforcers and lookouts I see on the street outside Gospel Mission: lurking about in their hoodies, talking on cell phones, swaggering back and forth looking as tough as they can, talking among themselves as if they're old friends, but you know deep down, none of them trusts the others. What will their lives be like in 5, 10, 20 years -- if they're still alive? Believe it or not, we as Christians have a duty to reach out to them, too.

But where is the outrage? Do we really care more for sled dogs than for other humans? Jesus told us there'd be days like these -- when "because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold" (Matt. 24:12 KJV) -- as the world awaits His return.

Or is this lack of outrage really because deep down, we're convicted that -- to use Walt Kelly's overworked line from Pogo -- we have met the enemy and he is us?

Some heresy about the DTES

There’s been a lot of talk lately about development on Vancouver’s Downtown East Side, with people concerned that “gentrification” (the bogeyman du jour in that section of town) will push the poor out of the area as housing prices rise; and then where would they go?



Unfortunately, the response from some of the advocates for affordable housing – as in the Vancouver Sun op-ed piece on Feb. 2  – makes the case that mixing social strata doesn’t work and demands that unnamed people and entities build more single-room occupancy (SRO) spaces and upgrade existing ones. The advocates don’t actually say who should pay for this, although I’m sure that, if asked, we would hear the usual responses: “the city can afford to spend millions on bike lanes” ... “the province can spend $600 million on a new roof for BC Place, but ...” ... yadda-yadda-yadda ...

Here’s a piece of heresy: what’s so great about keeping the poor on the Downtown East Side?

Really: isn’t this build-more-social-housing-on-the-DTES position little more than a call to perpetuate the ghetto?

This comes from ministering, observing and talking with people in the area, and for no compensation and with a sole interest, if I may say so myself, in seeing people’s lives change, turn around and move forward. Let's get real: this is Skid Road, a cauldron of despair, drugs, crime and prostitution; why would we want to pursue policies and strategies that don’t help people move on and instead make it easier for them to stay in that cauldron?

Perhaps it’s because there can be a buck in it for people who advocate that approach. But that would be cynical. Moi?

See, the first thing we need to do is stop glamorizing the place, and we've been doing that since the 1970s when the term Downtown East Side started getting traction. I remember thinking the term was kinda cool – a sort of New York cachet – like “Lower East Side” or “The Village”. These days, someone’s trying to coin “SoMa” for a stretch of Main Street (“South Main”, get it?): kind of like “SoHo” – South of Houston Street – in New York. (Vancouver has a history of wanting to be Just Like The Big Cities – so long as it’s not Toronto – and that goes back over a century, when architecture like the Dominion Building on Hastings resembled some of the buildings of the time in San Francisco. Unfortunately, a lot of its treatment of poor people resembles New York as depicted in “How The Other Half Lives” – in 1878.)

Next, we need to turn up our BS detectors when someone comes along with an idea they claim will “help” or “humanize” the “homeless”. Look at the people whose political and/or personal careers have been built on being “advocates” for the poor. Now consider the fruits of their labor. Recently, the UBC Museum of Anthropology cancelled an exhibit of portraits of the women who went missing from the Downtown East Side over a 10-year period. That was one of the wisest things a public body could have done, as it was responding to a couple of advocacy groups, which complained that the exhibit was primarily an exercise in self-promotion by the artist.

Only when we de-glamorize the area do we see that we are dealing with human beings, not subjects in a social experiment. Nor are they numbers on a “homelessness audit”: figures for a politician to point to and declare that’s his or her goal to have new rooms in fleabag “hotels” provided during their term in office.

We have to face the reality that the heart of the problems on the Downtown East Side is drugs. That, in itself, is not a big revelation, but the focus has strayed away from the need to get people off drugs. Do that, and you’re on your way to alleviating problems of health, crime, prostitution and the general fear people have of the area. We’ve tried the experiment of making it easier and “healthier” for people to take drugs, and it has not worked. For all its self-generated statistical evidence of success, the current approach of “harm reduction”, including places like InSite (the heroin equivalent of filter-tipped cigarettes), has not worked. Take a walk along Hastings between Cambie and Gore and tell me it’s made the streets safer (the way it was sold to the public almost a decade ago) and given people a new chance at life.

I believe we need to consider forced recovery treatment, not as a “punishment” for being a drug addict, but as duty of society to its people. The civil libertarians would claim that addicts are being denied their rights and that people have a choice to be addicts or quit, but I submit that someone who is lurching along the street, bent double, looking for a grain of crack that someone might have dropped and foregoing food for the sake of another hit has already lost that freedom of choice. It’s not their fault: it’s the insidious and deadly nature of the drugs.

There are three important elements, I believe, to changing people’s lives in this way:

1. Get them into treatment – real treatment programs, using proven techniques, that involve quitting and staying off

2. Help them develop a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. By doing that, they have something to focus on, rather something to turn away from. It’s the principle of “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you.” In this case, “all these things” means the “pleasure” derived from drug-taking.

3. Set up the treatment program anywhere but the Downtown East Side. If you want to get clean, get out of the cesspool. And stay out. Probably the best venue is a farm-like atmosphere or something else related to good, solid, productive work. Access should be severely limited. I can hear the howls of “concentration camp” now from the civil libertarians, but I’ve long since stopped believing they’re actually on the side of the poor (see above).

As I’ve said before, the problem on Skid Road is not homelessness. It’s hope-lessness. We need to restore hope – that intangible reason for carrying on; the liberating knowledge that none of us is capable of turning our lives around without Jesus. He is the hope that people need: the unconditional love that never fails – never has and never will.

And yes, I do see the results of that message as I see people start to rise up out of the ashes, get off the drugs ... or even start to smile again. But it’s tough to reinforce that message when the world around them – even people like mayors, members of Parliament and those who claim to be acting in their best interests – keep taking positions that such people, because they’re mentally ill and/or drug-addicted, are entitled to remain drug addicts, living on Skid Road.

It is not in our interest as a society to let any of our people live this way. God has not given up on these people: neither should we. If you talk with anyone in the Skid Road area, you’ll find they all have their stories, they all have experiences ... and they all have brains and things they can contribute. I meet artists, teachers, academics, working stiffs, chefs: people who’ve made one or two really bad mistakes and have wound up broke, on drugs or mentally ill. These people have gifts and talents to contribute and we as a society are denying ourselves those gifts.

Who among us hasn’t made a mistake? Who among us is without sin? Or are we actually being subtly self-righteous and judgmental, figuring they “made their choices” and are “paying the price”? Wracked with societal guilt, we then wail and gnash our teeth and ride off madly in all directions trying to “do something”. We forget – or ignore – the fact that Jesus already “paid the price” for everybody’s mistakes and then instructed us to reach out and help those whose fall was longer and harder than ours.