Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Oh find me a home...

THOMAS ROSE: ANALYSIS
Should having a home be a human right?
September 22, 2006
Let's face it. The homeless are not an attractive people. It is hard to be around them. They can look frightening, they can smell bad, and they most often want something from you. They make us uncomfortable, fearful and, yes, guilty.

Why don't they just all go away? But where?

In the past, some cities have tried to encourage the homeless to move on, even offering to pay their transportation and put a few dollars in their pockets. But that doesn't solve the problem, it only shuffles it about. And with signs suggesting the number of homeless will grow, cities everywhere are grappling with what to do with them.

Montreal recently banned overnight stays in public squares. Penalties include hefty fines and even jail.

Victoria has a similar bylaw, prohibiting the erection of any shelter in a public place as well as sleeping overnight in downtown parks.

Housing advocates say criminalizing the homeless this way is a disturbing and perhaps immoral trend. Rather than penalizing the homeless, they argue, homelessness itself should be declared illegal, and having shelter should be elevated to a basic human right, alongside freedom of religion and the right to vote.

The notion that having a home is a right is gaining some currency around the globe, not to mention in the corners of some of the most frigid cities in Canada. The right to housing is already included in several legally binding international documents.

The Vancouver Declaration on Human Settlements, for example, sets out the obligations of governments to provide adequate housing for all. The UN's Habitat Agenda and Plan of Action created a global action plan that confirmed the legal status of the human right to adequate housing. And the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, a treaty which Canada has ratified, obliges all states to "recognize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living, including adequate food, clothing and housing."

Many of these agreements are designed to deal largely with Third World problems that, according to the UN, have left upwards of 100 million people without adequate shelter. But in the context of a developed country such as Canada, the question has to be asked: How far do these rights go?


A new footing

One clue might be found in a ruling last spring by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Los Angeles. The court ruled 2-1 that L.A. cannot arrest people for sleeping or even sitting on public sidewalks at certain times of the day because that would be tantamount to "cruel and unusual punishment," which is banned by the U.S. Constitution.

That ruling would appear to put the legal status of basic shelter on an entirely new footing — from the lofty rhetoric of international agreements to the determined reality of constitutional law.

For L.A., and presumably other American cities, it also meant the courts were telling city officials that if they wanted to remove the indigent from the streets then they had to provide the means to accommodate them.

Homeless advocates in B.C. are now before the courts there making a similar argument and are hoping for a similar ruling. Seeking to turn the tables on those who would ban the homeless from sleeping in public places, these advocates argue that the bylaws enacted by the City of Victoria violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

So long as there is a greater number of homeless than the number of beds available in shelters, the reasoning goes, sleeping restrictions in public places should not be placed on the homeless.

This is a familiar argument to the people of Scotland. After a flurry of similar court challenges throughout the 1980s, during a recession and period of record homelessness, the Scottish Parliament passed legislation declaring all levels of government were obliged to provide housing to all citizens.

Recent amendments have upgraded that legislation so that city councils are now obliged to provide permanent accommodation to anyone officially assessed as homeless. As a result, tens of thousands have been given shelter, tens of thousands more are on waiting lists and yet as recently as this spring, homeless advocates in Scotland declared it isn't enough.

In the end, perhaps, the fact of shelter as a human need may not mean that governments must provide each one of their citizens with land, four walls and a roof. But recent developments suggest that the status quo is no longer enough.

Friday, September 22, 2006

Throwing stones



Broken Glass

Once upon a time, that’s the way I remember him.

Once upon a time, he and I lived in a glass shoe. And this glass shoe was neatly placed in the centre of a green field in the centre of a small village in the centre of a vast forest. And we were the centres of each other’s world. He played with transformers and I played with hot wheels. We spoke in small sentences, such as “I like this” or “lets play in the heel.”

Once upon a time, he was a boy and I was a girl, that’s the way we remember ourselves.

Once upon a time his hair was red and ine was blond. Everyone in the small village in the vast forest had black hair. They played with paper, tools and building blocks. They spoke in long sentences with large words. Such as “After long consideration and an introspective look we are content to obviate from the cultural inconsistencies.”


Once upon a time, we were young and our memory was here and now.

Once upon a time, he and I could no longer find joy in our transformers and hot wheels. We wanted our red and blond hair to darken and deepen. We found our short sentences lacking, all because there was a crack in our shoe and the long dark sentences had seeped through disturbing our sleep. Their words from the small village burnt our grassy field and soot covered our glass shoe.

Once upon a time, he and I were friends. We saw our similarities not our differences.

Once upon time, we left our glass shoe. We sought new shelter within the small village in the vast forest. In our short sentences we asked, “Please, share with us.” They pulled at our hair, examined our toys, and took pictures of us, standing next to the heel of our glass shoe now covered in soot in the centre of the burnt grass field.

Once upon a time, he and I thought we were okay. We fit with each other.

Once upon a time, they changed our clothing, took away our toys, cut our hair and extended our sentences. They wanted us to use their paper and tools and building blocks. They wanted us to walk in straight lines, and live in row houses made from wood and plastic. They gave us names, Fred and Mary. They gave us birth dates, watches, calendars and schedules. They laughed at our offerings of shells and grass.

Once upon a time, he found joy in our toys, in our appearance, in our language, in our similarities. That’s the way I remember him.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Traces...

Our routine has become so normal. Five in the morning, hit snooze button, eight minutes extra of sleep until I roll over and say, “time to wake up”. I never thought I could get used to making coffee before daylight, but I have. It’s our routine that we share and repeat five days a week, like directions on a shampoo bottle.
He leaves early on these mornings, six o’clock, for work. That is when the suite becomes mine. After he leaves, is when the life begins in the house, long after the coffee is brewed and the lunches are packed. He never sees what I see; centipedes crawling out onto the carpet. I tell him about them, he figures they are fictions. Again, this morning the centipedes emerge after he leaves. Shiny hard brown bodies, soft legs, the same soft legs moving like a Viking ships oars in the water heading into battle. This morning the centipede wasn’t ready for battle instead the lengthy insect was attempting to escape the floodwaters of last nights plumbing drama.
This is where the story really begins, at the point of discovery of a small wet spot outside of our bathroom door. I didn’t want to think about the wet spot. I wanted to linger on how he traced “I love you” on my back and waited for me to notice his code. I made him wait. I always make him wait. I wanted to linger on his silent evocations of love. But there was a wet spot on my floor. Both he and I turned to the cat in our minds; the cat was the most likely suspect.
Certainly she wasn’t innocent she often found ways to annoy us, force us to clean her mess, be it fur, dead animals she had convinced herself she killed and the occasional well-matted fur ball left in the right spot for us to step on
Certainly, this wet spot on my carpet was the work of her evil machinations to dominate our household and eventually the world. I put my nose down to the wet spot, hoping to find her innocent but afraid I might get my nose too close to something very unpleasant. No odor…nothing. She was absolved in my mind, but not his. He kept insisting she was the culprit, and I almost gave in until the turned to the bathroom door and noticed in the corner more wet carpet—she certainly had no part in more wet carpet. I flung open the closet door to reveal two water tanks; one for upstairs one for downstairs. I revealed a wet floor. He came barging through, male intensity and a desire to ascertain and fix the situation. This time the situation would not be fixed with male bravado, not even a well-placed phone call to the plumber would slow the amount of water issuing forth from the pipes.
At this moment, I wished I could go back to when he traced “I love you” on my back and hold time right there, far away from the water.

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Red Nails

As promised, creative inspirations will ensue here. I am nervous to put this on the blog, not because I am afraid of people and their criticism...cause I know what I can do and can't do, but I am freaked out someone will find my stuff, and pass it off as their own, which would break my heart. Although, I think to myself it will be a really small world that reads my blog and anything I put on here will be rough draft, no where near the final product so here I go with gustooooooo....



"Always, her painted red fingernails haunt me. They haunt me because I haven’t buried her like she buried me. The point of origin is my memory of her digging in the earth; using these glossy red nails, fake nails, to get in and under the moist dirt. She was compulsive about burying anything she had to explain. I remember a picture, a photograph, it must have been a birthday, because someone captured her image bowed over a blue balloon, and there in the centre were the red fingernails. There isn’t a single photograph or childhood memory without those fingernails always pointing, grasping, clawing raking over every truth and covering every child she had. Now as I am older, unearthed I find myself standing in the beauty section of drugstores, in front of the display for fake nails. Her brand is there. I finger the boxes, wondering if after 45 minutes of inspecting labels I will purchase her nails for myself."

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

When the pipe breaks the water will flow, grasshopper

Well, when you notice a wet spot on your floor, sometimes it doesn't pay to investigate where it is coming from...Why I do, I don't know!

So, outside my bathroom, was an odd singular wet spot. It was there all day and had gotten slightly worse by the end of the evening. So I alerted Dylan to the situation, we both couldn't figure it out, but then I noticed weird coloring near the water heater closet and felt the ground around there and sure enough it was damp as well. So we opened the water heater closet and Dylan noticed the top of one them was leaking. He touched it...just touched it, nothing else...and well from there is the point where the pipe burst and we began the process of bailing water and trying to call anyone who would help us solve the issue of water that wouldn't stop running.

Essentially from what we can figure at this point, is that the minerals in our water corroded the connection from the water to the hot water tank...so what Dylan touched was the last remaning vestiges keeping the water from flowing copiously out and into our home. So for the next 45mins we rotated bucket...three, at an alarming rate, so much so my back hurts and Dylan is pooched. No plumber would come and we had to call the city to shut of the water main...this means the WHOLE house has NO running water...none, nada, nil. And really, I knew it would be a struggle to not have water, considering I am a water hog, just in my drinking style, forget my cleaning needs...but the kicker was, oh and it hurts to say this even now, the kicker and true kick in the teeth was when I realized at 5am we would not being having any coffee...NO COFFEE...WAH WAH WAH WAH...

Of course once you wake up and your body starts functioning there are other issues surrounding water needs. Uhm and I am an avid hand washer...no water...this is 3rd world living, and I am a first world girl...PLUMBING is my SAFETY network...without running water, I am lost, feeble, and weak.

Okay, so a bit of the dramatic, although it sure puts everything in perspective, the luxury I have and have had.

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

And it came to life...


Okay school is back in session. And I hate it. I was loving this campus during the summer. Empty hallways, empty classrooms...now, all I have is empty heads. AND LOTS OF THEM...crowding the hallway, making line-ups I have to stand in for three hours, messing up the bathroom, yelling in the hallways...THEY"RE BACK! And I want to send them back to wherever they came from!
Yes, Scrooge of Academia I am!