David Olive wrote an informative article about poverty in Canada. Here’s an excerpt:
If the poor weren’t so conveniently invisible, maybe we’d come to our moral senses and devise a national strategy for eliminating poverty.
But the one in six Canadians trapped in poverty are hidden in plain sight. They return from their minimum-wage work to a cot in a flophouse. They continue to live with an abusive spouse for lack of an alternative[…]
“Poverty is fear, malnutrition, chronic bad health, loneliness, illiteracy and inadequate job skills and no time or money to upgrade them,” Nash says.
“It’s not knowing whether you and your kids will have a decent place to sleep next month.”
Imagine yourself in a state of constant dread. That’s poverty.
John Clarke, an organizer with the Ontario poverty coalition ever since OCAP was founded in 1990, believes, like many anti-poverty activists, that only a widespread sense of outrage will rid us of this social evil.
“When OCAP was launched, I couldn’t imagine that over its history the conditions of drab misery for poor citizens would actually worsen rather than improve,” says Clarke. “I believe Canadians are concerned about homelessness, for instance. But passive indignation is not enough.
“You have to challenge these injustices endured by our fellow citizens. Because only when politicians see that the public is acting on its discontent with the status quo will we see a difference.”
Unfortunately, the United States has higher poverty rates than Canada. Additionally, the privatized insurance-based price-inflated healthcare system in the United States denies the vast majority of poor and homeless people medical treatment.
Nonetheless, poverty is a global problem. Both the United States and Canada float in the same sinking boat. No nation can survive when it values the greedy desires of an undeserving but socio-politically powerful few, rather than valuing the rights and safety of all the people within it.
The entire global community needs to actively work to successfully eradicate poverty through decentralized movements based on the power of the people.
What do you think?