even if I don't have much to say. The city has been getting me down lately. It's just too much sometimes, as I bus across town, to see images in such stark relief. Suffering pinned under opulence in the ongoing battle between human need and human greed. I can't even think of it as politics or ideology, even though I know it is. It just seems like humanity is to help people when they need it if you can. And our city is not lacking in can, we even prove it periodically with things like the Children's Hospital telethon that raised $10 million. Nor is there any lack of need out there.

The problem, I think, is that we've let it become ideology, and the dominant one is a sort of myth of the self made man, that anyone can make it if they try, so thus those who don't, those who need extra support, are just too lazy or fucked up to try. Which is bullshit. If you've never tried to survive on any sort of social assistance then come see me when you've made it through an entire month on about $450 and tell me just how laughable you now know the phrase "welfare bum" to be. People with options don't do it.

A new major study came out recently on class war and the wealth gap in the US which suggested that class war might just be the new war because it is becoming increasingly obvious the amount of class-determinism that is built into our society. The study showed that North America right now is the place with the least class-mobility since 19th century England. This means that if you're born middle-class, it's pretty much a given that you'll die middle-class, and for those of us who haven't quite hit even that line yet, well, we're likely to die never having gotten there. I'm not saying we should all just up and quit, but I sure am glad I'm in it for something other than money. CBC was talking about the study during "The Hour" last night if you want to go look it up.

I guess this is now two substantial rants in a pretty minimal amount of time, eh? Sometimes I just can't help myself. I was waiting for the 20 the other day at the stop across the street from where I live and a woman with two young sons (maybe 4 and 6?) walked up to the bus stop. I first noticed that her children were whiny, but before I moved to put my headphones on to block them out, I listen and realized that they were whining about being hungry and how their mom had promised them lunch. I got talking to their mom after distracting the kids with the job of splitting a fruit-to-go I'd had in my bag, and she told me a story that I would never have wanted to think of, to believe really happened, of bussing around all day with two hungry kids trying to find a food bank with something left to give. They'd already been to three and been sent away because there was nothing left.

So I opened up my wallet, pulled out the $20 sitting there, and told her to get her kids something to eat. She didn't want to take it at first, and I understand because as she said, she wasn't a beggar. But I insisted. I don't have a lot of money, but there was no way I needed that twenty bucks like she did. The worst part came after we got on the bus though. There had been another woman sitting at the bus stop the whole time, and as we stood near each other on the bus, she told me that I shouldn't have done that because that woman's problems were "her own fault" and "didn't she think before having children?" and really I should know better because charity like that will just "help her stay too lazy to work." Can she please have been a different species from me?

Maybe that woman had never been poor, let alone understood it, but to be willing to write the other woman off, and her sons, because of ideology, is more than I can handle. If she did understand poverty at all, that woman would have know that the other would have loved the dignity and stability that comes from working and having a reliable income. She did not choose to rely on the foodbank because it was easier. Being poor and living in poverty suck, badly. People do not choose them. People can get stuck on them because they lack other options or the resources to realize them, but trust me, the closer to middle class you get, the more comfortable life gets, and that's what everyone wants. We'd all be middle class if we could, but some of us just can't. (and I don't mean me, or anyone specifically, but just as a generalized principle, because having a middle class requires having people below them. We've gone over this).

Watching CBC last night, I did get the point. This does seem like fertile breeding grounds for class war, as I'm sure anyone who's ever panhandled outside a starbucks can tell you. We even have a dangerously high percentage of un or under employed young men, which is one of the most important primers for civil conflict. How so? Youth, that being anyone under 30, employment statistics are not included in the general employment stats. The figure for men in that group for combined un and under (not making enough to live off) employed is well over 50%. If they can make a better living, the argument goes, fighting an "unjust system," well, what would you do?

(end rant)