ugh. It's early and I'm awake. I'm trying to make myself get up earlier so I won't be as miserable when my 8:30 am exam rolls around on Saturday, but it's tough because I haven't been sleeping all that well either. Too much stuff on the brain, I think trouble's a brewing. This just seems less and less like a world that the people I love should have to struggle through. I just can't imagine what so many millions of people must be thinking sometimes, but even if as a society we've killed off our sense of decency and responsibility, our sense of entitlement is stronger than ever. You can put almost any one on the defensive by suggesting that our consumption patterns are destroying well, pretty much the world, because we spend our lives working to acquire things without thinking about the consequences. You'll get responses like "I just want what I could never have growing up" or "I want my kids to have what I didn't." I understand the sentiment behind both quite well, but the problem is that both associate well being with acquiring increasingly large stockpiles of crap.

Wouldn't it be enough if your children were happy and well-adjusted, even if they have less actually material bullshit than you did? And regarding getting what you didn't have growing up, I have to argue that every child SHOULD grow up wanting things they don't get, especially so long as our society indoctrinates children with so many messages about what they should want, because we all know that kids whose parents never say no to them turn out to be spoiled brats (okay, at least usually). So in other words, that response is something like "I want to be the spoiled brat I never got to be as a child." I think children who grew up feeling like they had too little usually lacked parenting more than anything else.

No one's still reading this anyways, so I'll keep on to a thought I had yesterday. I think I'm starting to understand the whole "living outside" thing where once people live on the street for a certain period, it's hard for them to come back inside to live. Throughout what I know of human history, human settlement has always been associated with land. Humans live by occupying land, by having some sense of entitlement to the land needed for their survival. Whether owned collectively or individually, humans have always had a relationship to their land. You see the problem. Even leaving aside how alienated us city dwellers are from land, there remains the problem that many of us have no land. Right around the same time that the Brits removed access to land for the poor, they also were involved in a huge colonial experiment that focused on taking the land of entire nations. And I think that's basically the problem. So many people live in intense instability and feel disenfranchised, and these are the people with no land. Homeowners, as a segment of the population, have an amazingly high voter turn out rate, while among those who don't own any property, voting is even lower than the average for my age group.

Did that make no sense? The living outside connection comes back in here: so these are very poor and disenfranchised people, but they come to join a community that does, collectively, feel entitlement to land, specifically, the streets. While that may not be exactly choice real estate, I can well understand that sometimes that might be better than renting someone crappy hotel room or whatever, because then you have no entitlement to the space you occupy. I have no entitlement to the space I occupy right now. I have an agreement that says if I can keep paying for it, someone will keep letting me live here, but if I can't pay, well, I have no underlying right. I think this has something to do with what I was on about earlier, which is basically the way everyone who's not strives to be middle class. People really just want land, a place they are entitled to, because that's where stability and security come from.

One more thing? What if I just give you the numbers? According to census data (I think these numbers are 2001, so I'm behind the times, I know), in this province less than 5% of young people whose families live below the poverty line (I think it's still around $25,000 household annually) go to university. Someone should tell them that UBC promises no one will be unable to attend for financial reasons. Right.