The "Worst" kind of violence?

A message board outside a church near my place currently (at least, as of Sunday) displays the aphorism, "Poverty is the worst kind of violence".

I've spent the past couple of days muttering, "what the heck does that mean?". It's a little like eating spicy food that still needs salt: something is missing there.

To begin with, the word "violence" generally has some negative connotations, and when I hear a term used like that, it's often in the context that someone else is guilty of it.

But whom are we accusing?

Lest we cudgel our brains into porridge over this, let's remind ourselves that even Jesus, the Son of God, acknowledges that there will always be poverty. That's why one of His commandments to His followers is to take care of the poor. Not eradicate poverty (which is one of those well-meaning, world-based "goals" that seems laudable, but because it's impossible to achieve, can bring a sense of futility and despair when that goal is never reached), but lift the poor out of the mire to make room for and set an example for the others who, inevitably, will slip. Just as God sends storms and illness and other trials to strengthen our faith and increase our reliance on Him; just as He created good and evil, darkness and light, I believe poverty is one of His creations so that those who are not impoverished can carry out that commandment and so that we can all learn how interdependant we are on one another and on God.

So if we make a statement like, "poverty is the worst kind of violence," are we not leveling an accusation at God?

"The poor," Jesus says, "ye shall have always." He never says they'll be the same poor. An area like the Downtown East Side should be a flow-through point, where people come for a time, and then get on with life. Missions like ours exist to get people turned around and back on track. Sadly, the DTES has become less of a thoroughfare and more of a dead end, with bodies and lives piling up.

Rather than look at poverty as being violence, I believe it's an opportunity from God: an opportunity to help and be helped and to see His glory, no matter what. I remember a fellow who came in often to Rainbow Mission (which closed at the end of 2006) and whom I still see from time to time -- Abraham Jones is his name -- and he once gave a testimony: "I thank God that I don't have a roof over my head tonight. I thank God that I don't know where my next meal is coming from. I thank God that I don't have a job." The inference was that he knew he could rely on God through anything and he was grateful for the opportunity; it's easy to glorify Him when things look good, but to do so when things look bad requires a whole lot of faith.

So is poverty "violence"? No. Keeping people in poverty, whether by ignoring them (like the rich dude in Jesus' parable, who ignores the pleas of the beggar Lazarus) or creating institutions that deny them hope and the truth of the Gospel, is closer -- definitely, an offence to God.

The story goes that a newspaper surveyed its readers about 100 years ago with the question, "what is the greatest threat to mankind?" The great author, GK Chesterton, submitted a simple, two-word response: "I am."

Let me turn that on its ear. What is the greatest asset of mankind?

You are.

We are.
 

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.