Acceptable?

According to the author, editor and humorist Bennett Cerf, New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia would spend one day a month (I think it was) presiding over Magistrate's Court in his city. As Mayor, he was Chief Magistrate, and took that part of the job seriously. One day, a woman was brought before him, charged with stealing a loaf of bread. She confessed, saying she had no other way to feed her family. He fined her $50, then suspended the sentence and found everyone else in the courtroom guilty of "living in a city where a woman has to steal to feed her family". Each person was fined $10 and the sheriff was ordered to take up the collection on the spot. Then he turned the money over to the woman.

As I arrived at The Lord's Rain Tuesday morning, I passed an old man sitting on a street-level window ledge. His eyes were closed and he was at least half asleep. He's a fixture in the area: a man who calls himself a Pastor and putters around the Downtown East Side, usually with a walker, proclaiming Jesus to anyone who'll listen. Sometimes he has a roof over his head; sometimes not. It appears this was one of those "not" nights.

Another frequent visitor at The Lord's Rain is a man named Bill. He's well into his 60s and spends his days pushing a shopping cart around the city -- I sometimes see him in the West End, which is a considerable distance from the DTES -- collecting bottles. "Good morning, Father," he says when he comes in for his coffee. (I'm not a Catholic priest, but that's his way of addressing a leader in a religious setting, so that's OK with me.) Bill has the most gentle spirit and has astounded doctors by bouncing back from a lung infection about a year and a half ago that the doctors were certain was going to kill him.

Last month, I was in Toronto, and stepped on the subway one time to find the too-familiar aroma of stale urine. It was coming from a man who was sound asleep, folded up in one of the seats. People in the same carriage seemed to look past, around or through him: but never at him.

WHY IS THIS ACCEPTABLE?

Why is it acceptable that men in their 60s and 70s, with long lives behind them -- and who maybe made a couple of mistakes here and there that proved costly in the long run -- have to collect bottles and cans and sleep in doorways, waiting for a free-coffee place to open up? Why is it acceptable for a man to sit in his own urine-reeked clothes on a subway while people try to imagine he's not there? Why is it acceptable for people to have to urinate and defecate in alleys while the leaders of the city -- one of the "World's Most Livable" and "Greenest" cities -- dither over how to provide public facilities for them? (Even to the extent of suggesting it's the responsibility of the transit authority, for the luvva Mike!)

And yet evidently it must be for some people, because the situation persists and even seems to get worse. Ignoring them and figuring someone else can help people has hardly been a resounding success; remember what Jesus said: "what you do to the least of these, you do to Me."

That would include ignoring them. Ignoring these people is tantamount to ignoring Jesus.

Selah.

And lest you think that rising up and saying THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE! involves some mammoth undertaking, consider the guy on the Toronto subway. As we got near my stop, I knelt down beside him and roused him to see if he was OK. He said he was. Then I told him I was praying for him. "It's all I can do," I said. I was almost ashamed to say it, but he looked up and smiled and said, "Thanks, man."

I don't know why I was ashamed: probably because I didn't have a magic wand and didn't know where to take him to bathe and get a fresh change of clothes (in Vancouver, I would have taken him to The Lord's Rain). But really, prayer is the most effective tool we have when used as directed. And the sense that someone cares enough even to say, "hello in there" can plant a seed of hope that can grow more than we could ever ask or think.

InSite - reminding us of the job at hand

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that InSite -- the "supervised" drug injection facility on the Downtown East Side -- should continue to receive public funds on the grounds that drug addicts have the "right" to shoot up in a healthy environment.

Once again in this country, "rights" has trumped "right". InSite has been around for eight years, and despite its claims to having reduced the infection rate of HIV/AIDS, there are some inescapable facts:

• people are still doing drugs, many of them openly on the streets or in alleys
• there is still a "market" for drugs, because those coming into InSite had to have acquired them from someplace
• women are still selling their bodies for drug money and often getting killed in the process
• street crime has grown worse over that time
• gang activity -- fuelled by the drug trade -- has also grown worse over that time
• police are increasingly frustrated at not being able to enforce the laws that are supposed to protect people (get a cop talking about InSite and you'll see a completely different picture than the one put forward by the proponents)

Certainly, the idea that someone should be able to inject drugs with a clean needle in a more-or-less sterile environment is "good", but as we so often see, "good" is the enemy of "best". As you'll see from the Province article, the federal government argued eloquently about the mixed messages InSite sends. We try to tell people that it's bad to do drugs, then we turn around and enable it. The subliminal message from society -- as represented by certain "experts" and various levels of the court system -- is, "we really don't care if you go through life as a drugged-out zombie: that's your 'choice' and we won't take that away from you".

This just in: drugs have already taken away that freedom. You look at someone groping around the streets and alleys, looking for a grain of crack cocaine to smoke, fumbling to find a vein with a needle, or sidling up to someone passing through with the "I-just-got-a-job-in-Fort-McMurray-but-I-need-to-get-enough-money-for-the-bus" line and tell me how capable they are of making a wise "choice".

This is all in the name of "harm reduction", and as I've said before, Jesus is not into harm reduction: He's into harm elimination. The law of His time on earth banished the "woman with the issue of blood" in the name of harm reduction. Jesus turned around and healed her. Same with lepers and demonized people. So much of the Downtown East Side resembles a leper colony or Samaria. But the healing has to begin with the hope that healing is possible. The woman with the issue wouldn't have put her life on the line -- literally -- to touch the hem of Jesus' garment if she didn't have a glimmer of hope that it would work when spending her life savings on medical treatment had failed. Statements like the remark by then mayor Sam Sullivan to the effect that, while addicts want to be clean, he'd like to get up and walk out of his wheelchair, but that's not going to happen either (emphasis mine), serve to stomp that hope into ashes.

But wailing and gnashing teeth that the law is an ass won't do. The ruling simply strengthens our resolve to continue preaching the Gospel -- and with it, Hope -- to the people we serve on the Downtown East Side. Let them know that a life without drugs, poverty and despair is not some vague promise in a book, but something mandated of God and, in fact, attainable. Drugs, poverty and despair are not really the problems -- in fact, as a student from Columbia Bible College pointed out recently at the Mission, for many people, they're the solution. The problems that lead to that solution are deeper issues that only God, through Jesus Christ, can identify, expose and heal, and they involve turning to Him and letting Him do His thing. That way, people on the DTES can become a generation of Overcomers, which could be far more dangerous to The Man than a neighbourhood full of addicts.

Now that I think of it and run it through the filter of seeking God and His glory in all things, the court ruling isn't so bad, at that. It reminds us that The Man -- the legal system, social-service programs and health-care "professionals" -- cannot be relied on to save people. Only God can do that -- just as Jesus told Martha after her brother Lazarus had died, "you will see the Father glorified". So while there is still daylight, we have to keep working hard to remind people that God can be glorified in any situation -- even (or especially) in the midst of Canada's Worst Postal Code.