As most of you know from the bio, I used to work in social services. 12 years. From age 18 to 30.  Most of that time was spent on the eastside. I grew up there.  The hardest time was four years in skid row running a medical clinic. The staff was great, the job was good and some life-long friends were made as a result of our working together. We did good.  But it was hard.

In many ways, it was a defining time of my life. It also nearly killed me.

There is something about dealing with the sick, the addicted, the mentally ill and the forgotten souls of the world that simply drains you. After four years at the clinic and nearing my twelth year in the trenches, I was done. Burnt out. Dead in the heart and dull in the mind. I was just a few months away from being one of the walking dead myself. So, I got out. Honestly, I got out just in time. I was very depressed.

But some stayed. I have no idea how they do it. But they do. Some of them stay and work and suffer. Mother Teresa-like. I remember the words of one such dedicated person, May Gutteridge, when she and I met at her St. James Social Service. I had been in the area two years and had done good things. I thought I’d be well received. She looked at me and said, “It is not the work you do, you know. It is how long you last”.

She was referring, of course, to making a difference. Making a real difference takes time. Lots of it. Anyone can burn brightly for a few years. Very few can dedicate their whole lives to it. But she did. And I didn’t.

My friend, JG, is one of those who have plied the mean streets of Vancouver’s downtown eastside for decades. She has the staying power. She can hack it. She carries on. It is some kind of strength of which I am not in the least capable.

And she answered my second-to-last blog (Gettin’ biblical on ya’).  She has a point.  This is what she wrote:

Seems every year now, we are expected to pull together a homeless Count of the entire City. As if we pulled such numbers off the corner of our desks.

It is about a three month job. Map, recruit 300 volunteers, co-ordinate, train, appease… This year they gave us 5 weeks… So on top of regular work days we have to do the Count. Anything that needs reading has had to compete with everything else and some of it gets lost. Sorry.  I lost your e-mail/blog.

So I get it when a friend yells at me for not responding. My oh-so-urban life has come unbalanced, my brain has come unstuck and my friends are being ignored.  I get it.  So I read your blog.  And here goes:

David, it isn’t where you are that brings you to the awareness you are expressing.  You are coming to awareness because you have time to attune. You have time to think. You have time.

A person can’t live more on-the-grid and in-the-rat-race than I.  I have no time. I can’t think.

Occasionally, I can see. I have an apartment in a 1910 building at Robson and Thurlow. Heritage plumbing, heritage wiring, 3rd floor. The windstorm picked up all the filth of peak oil and other people’s SUVs and threw the black micro-particles through my barely open windows. And my windows were open only a crack.  But even in my altered state of distraction and with my normal flakiness I had to notice the urban pollution encroaching everywhere.

I don’t usually see it, though.  This time it was because I had spent the day of the storm worrying about my neighbours and friends, some of whom live near me behind dumpsters, in doorways, and in driftwood lean-tos on the waterfront.  I worked all that day to make sure they knew we were opening extra shelters for them, and advising others of available underground parking garages for those too anxious to risk coming into a shelter. I didn’t take much time to notice things or think for myself. Too busy.

But I was lucky. In the morning, my electricity was working, heritage wiring and all. My place was filthy from the urban grime, but my coffee was hot, my housecoat warm, and the TV news was relatively good. No reports that anyone of my friends had died or been injured. Relief. Still, that windstorm had taken more trees in Stanley Park. That always worries me. People live in the park.

My outdoor friends are people against whom our political masters are committing genocide-by-neglect. People with severe multiple disabilities, scorned and ignored, are deliberately left to fend for themselves in the savage streets of the urban jungle.  It is the major crime I face every day.

We know a human left to live outside, on or off the grid will die 20 – 30 years sooner than you or I who lives indoors. And yet politicians, planners, bureaucrats and the greed machine scheme to eliminate any indoor housing the poor and disenfranchised might afford, to make sure that they eat our day old donuts as their dietary staple, that they are regularly and systematically victimized and that they are deprived of the basics of health.

It is not that our province and country does not have enough to go around, it is that these “little ones” have been chosen to go without so that the wealthy can have more.

As manifested by the clear-cut forests, the filthy polluted air, the soon-to-burst oil pipelines and the wholesale risking of the life-sustaining nature of our rivers and oceans, those in greed ignore the truth. It is the venerable story again and again of the slaughter of the lambs of God.

God rails against these choices from Genesis through the Prophets, and through the mouth of Jesus. But the rich and powerful don’t listen.

Because of that, David, I cannot entertain your suggestion of forgiveness for those responsible for this state of affairs. They are not ignorant.  They know exactly what they are doing. They are choosing Hell over the gift of God’s green earth, and over the human beings and other creatures that inhabit it.

A better biblical quote might be: Matt 6:24 “No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”