Every city has one … the place where “progressives” go to feed:
The joke I have among friends is that there is one statistic not covered by official sources, but which can be seen anytime one drives down 20th Street or parts of 22nd Street in Saskatoon. These streets have the highest “limp” rate in Canada … that is, I’ve never seen so many people who limp, hobble, or shuffle along in my life. I feel sorry for some of them, as they are the blamelessly dispossessed such as schizophrenics or physically disabled through no fault of their own. But … and it’s a big “but”; many are victims of vice … drinking, fighting, crime, and impaired operation of vehicles. If you’ve worked or lived among this “class”, you find out pretty fast that most “limps” go hand in hand with the battle scars and rap-sheet.
Try Vancouver’s downtown eastside.
the Regis in downtown Calgary. a park full of limps and brown paper bags while the cops bust jaywalkers with regular ease.
I have mixed feelings about the cops with regards to dealing with limpers. A Jaywalker gets a burnt stomach and obediently pays the extortion.
When a cop has to deal with a limper he risks the following. Getting punched, stabbed, AIDS, Hep C and the shame of harassing the less motivated er, I mean the less fortunate. The pointless paper work is daunting as well when you consider that the limper will be limping out of jail before the ink on the paper is dry.
Barton Street, Hamilton. We call ’em “soft shells”.
t’is better to be limping then laying face down in a pool of your own puke!!!!
China-Town, Spadina and Dundas
The alcoholics that drink the chinese cooking sherry, all limpers.
They can hardly move.
Or see.
limpers dont count as jaywalkers in Calgary because they go down to the cop shop about a block away, get “processed” and are out in a couple of hours. no revenue but a net cost to the city. limpers can only make it a few blocks from the ‘great pyramid of sleasa” , the homeless shelter. which boasts 12 ft ceilings and a magnificent brick exterior on a triangular lot, a perfect backdrop for drug transactions which are readily observable from the road. meanwhile , wandering limpers roll up crack in foil and deftly stick it in sidewalk cracks while further limpers pick it up. no transaction , but you can see it all happen in less than one light change even if you are an unobservant cuss like myself.
mostly law abiding folks who jaywalk while the LRT train is driving by, slowly, giving lots of safe time are a ready source of cash to Bronco Daves Liberal spending city hall.
take a look at liberal Toronto which has the poorest economic record in the country
socialism breeds poverty and despair – no one prospers except the liberal elite
they’re starting to call us Canuckistan for good reason
Consider this.
At about the last of puberty every teenager starts to limp.
Teenagers know everything much better than their parents or anyone who is older then them. They are all knowing, all seeing, all everything as opposed to the old people.
Experience talking here, from own teenage years and from the behavior of the descendants of the corresponding age.
Some of it is discernible even after master’s degree; in certain respect justified though in the big scheme of things, not.
It presupposes that a grown up has lost the faculty to think, bar those that refuse to think.
Now, depending on the superstructure that is all of the years from birth to let’s say 18.
If the children are taught and made to think along certain ethics, though not being knocked over their head constantly, they will probably handle the storm of late teen and twenties somewhat different, perhaps better, than those that have never heard of ethics.
So it seems that those on the Saskatoon’s 20th St. were left on the train station when the train of life passed by. They just did not know how to get on.
The socialists keep telling them, ‘you are ok, everything will be fine’.
Now the socialists have ready made, make work projects, where they go on with ‘you are ok, it’s these other people’s, you see walking to and from work, fault’ and sucking the taxes, and, as it seems everything will be fine.
I suppose, now, all hell will break loose. However think of that time when you decided to take the rocky road rather than the easy street.
Slum eh? As defined by UN-HABITAT? Or lacking at least two of the following;
1) clean water
2) sanitation
3) security of tenure
4) non-hazardous area
5) two or more ppl to a room
I’ve lived in almost all the cities on that list and have walked and lived on all those mean streets. It was my lifestyle you see and I left it behind when it was time to move on, fortunately without a limp.
There will always be streets like those in any city you care to name and I know what I’m talking about. I now live in Moscow but I’ve lived in Rome, Tokyo, Tunisia not to mention any one of the ex-Soviet Republics where I now make my living.
Those lists are just a preliminary to grease the skids for some new piece of legislation or reallocate funding. As pointed out in the original article by the resident of Halifax (I used to live on Gottingen st. myself in the late 70’s, frequented the Misty Moon to indulge in all manner of debauchery) it was number 10 this time around after being number 1. Oh the shame!
Canada is a rich country but there is a thing called the “law of diminishing return”. Ever been on a rez? That’s where you’ll find slums! How many billions pumped into such a small group of people only to have it misspent by the tribal elders and extended family or siphoned back out by the army of leaches that feed off of the system. Think I’m picking on Natives? How many white second (or third) generation welfare recipients do you know? I knew plenty!
My parents live in Winnipeg. No amount of money will make north Winnipeg safe, but’s it’s still not a slum.
Cry me a river Canada, you don’t know how good you have it, for now.
MofoAthiest>
I’ll agree with you. I’ve also lived and walked many of those same streets in some of those same countries. The back streets of Tokyo is a funny mention though, as it’s just different entirely.
Canadians will never understand or fully appreciate their lives or their freedoms until they do. Sympathy and guilt is a universally misunderstood and misguided emotion engineered by an uneducated liberal sense of what poverty, crime and out of society really means and represents.
Must agree with MofoAtheist and Knight 99 about slums and areas for drunks, drug addicts and chronic layabouts to hang together. They are all missing or have temporarily suspended the drive to make themselves or their families better off tomorrow than they are today. From what I have seen in the real world, many people living in real slums as defined by MofoAtheist want to get ahead. They go onto the streets selling gum, or DVDs or magazines or ice cream. Or they go out into the community and work as guards or maids or houseboys or whatever they can get. They send their kids to school. They make sure that they are fed to the best of their ability.
To the contrary, those living in Canadian “slums”, don’t do these kinds of things. They rely on the community for “support” to maintain their lifestyle of choice. As soon as they start to look after the future for themselves and/or their family, they tend to leave. Of course as neighborhoods evolve, many long time residents find themselves trapped and surrounded by the dependants and I’m not talking about them.
We will never “cure” this problem by feeding it money out of a misplaced sense of guilt or sympathy. The best way to reduce the number of limpers is to change the environment that rewards and sustains the lifestyle. Remove the carrots, apply a stick and change will occur.
*Knight 99
Yes. Japanese culture is different and Tokyo back streets reflect that. The slums are hidden behind the doors of normal looking flats. What you don’t see are four people living in a three mat room. What you do see is an endless parade of drunks, both ambulatory and otherwise. Plenty of machines dispensing food and drink, public toilets in all the stations. You could live on the street for days and finally get back to your mat for a sleep before your roomates made life unlivable again, or you couldn’t pay the rent. Have you ever hung around Shinjuku station?
Yeah, you’re right. It’s just not a good fit. It’s just too clean and orderly a façade.
Poverty is not sinple, but our response to it in Canada has been. Just throw money at it.
MofoAthiest
You see, the thing is, most of the world live like you describe “four people living in a three mat room” this is very much normal experience of people other than North America and maybe (a key word) wealthier parts of Europe.
Usually the common expression is the “economics of scale”. If you can’t afford it you work out best solution that you can come up with.
When I came to this country, Canada, in 1968, we were living in conditions more or less that you describe, in Calgary. Never thought that it was bad or good, it was.
Though, don’t know anybody that remained in that condition, even within a year.
Funny thing if not ironic is, and it may come as a surprise to a whole lot of people, the communists that run this particular country of Eastern Europe made sure that the plebeians are educated with all the right syntax and terminology of the free world, the trouble was when you got to be 18 and applied the word to the reality, you may have more often than not end up in the ‘key’ industrial complex (the prison).
It was very much as the operation of today’s Canadian Human Rights Commission and its associated companies. It’s all in the syntax.
To live three to a room is in no way extraordinary, exceptional or anything of the sort, it is only a point of curiosity to the North American mind.
The people in North America, at least in many generations never have had to live through war, a real war, unlike what they call war, in Iraq that is not on the territories of North America.
Those, from North America that had to go and fight WWII, will likely have a different view of what war is than those that just read about it. And if you read about it, or seen a movie, you would not recognize reality.
Don’t know why I go on like this. Drinking wine listening to the Three Tenors and Dylan and Johnny Cash on PBS will make you think deep. Or maybe not.
Just to make it clear it is ‘only’1:2 am where I’m
*Lev, I eschew wine for gulps of Pyat Azure vodka and a pickle, then a sniff of my nicotine stained finger to help it all settle. But I think I get your meaning.
Setting war aside as much as possible given the history of this part of the world I find that people outside of NA and select parts of Europe where I have traveled, who live in diminished conditions (from my perspective) are hungry to upgrade. They just have a harder time for a thousand different reasons.
When the Soviet Union collapsed lots of people lost their free government supplied 50 m2 flats in Moscow to unscrupulous scammers (or the folks in the Duma) who bought them out and relocated them outside the garden ring next to say, power station #29. Then resold the entire building block for huge sums. Property prices here are 5,000 USD m2 in the center, or higher. Rent is impossible except for expats or the well off. Sometimes it’s the mafia that burns you out or ties you up until you sign the flat over. Maybe you lost everything in the bank collapses or due to hyperinflation. Sometimes you come in from outside Moscow looking to make a living, it’s incredibly risky. There is no social safety net here. If you can’t feed yourself or lose you residence you live on the street until the winter comes and then you are dead from the elements or bootleg booze. A bottle of vodka can be had for 50 rubles. The spring thaw always brings a few surprises (corpses, more than you would think) liquor and liquor related deaths being the biggest cause of death.
Compare that with Canadian poverty. People might develop a limp. Here if you are homeless and make it through the winter the militia will round everyone up and move you to the countryside, outside of Moscow where you can stay out of sight of the fine citizens and the foreigners.
The kicker is that if you talk to a Russian about what a sad state of affairs that is for those poor people they will look at you and laugh and Russia’s new found hydrocarbon and heavy metals wealth will not change that attitude. It’s the extreme opposite of Canada but it serves as a reference point I think.
I’m trying to not let it affect me because it’s just inhuman. But I don’t have much sympathy for what passes for poverty in Canada.
Tangentially-related (re: social workers), the Toronto School Board is going to finally do something about the violence at schools…you guessed it…spend millions of dollars to hire more social workers and counsellors!
Well-meaning, brain-dead socialists.
Discipline and toughness addresses violence…hugs are for hurt feelings. The violence at schools is not a result of hurt feelings.
Who I think are “brain dead” are exactly the people who look down and make sweeping suppositions and cast judgement from upon high, not once ever setting even a foot in these communities… nevermind having a mother who did drugs, or having a father that beat you or raped you, or having a brother that was shot for hanging out with the wrong people.
I do believe that to ’empower’ these people, the “power” must come from inside. Supporting that change in a person’s life is a noble thing, and I see conservatives and dippers alike do good deeds all the time.
To blame this all on socialism is the biggest farce and retarded copout argument I have ever heard. We have many other things to blame on socialism, but not poverty. Poverty has been rampant across society since man could laud wealth over another, and there have been governments to support it (property rights and laws to prevent me from bashing you on the head and taking your wealth). It existed long before socialism ever did. A conservative government in Canada still props up many of these programs that serve as disincentives to poor people learning to help themselves.
Read a few books people. It’s not socialists, or liberals, or dippers… it’s SOCIETY. And conservatives are part of society.
Or you can exposit profoundly upon it from your own internally generated wisdom like some people here and come off looking like a complete nonce.
It’s absolutely astounding the ignorance some people display.
Cheers!
Leto
This planet cannot support the growing population. Two choices:
1. Move or
2.Reduce the population
Normally the weak are the first to go.
This is sad but a fact.So don’t kill off all your brain cells by the age of 14.
MofoAthiest>
“Have you ever hung around Shinjuku station?”
No I haven’t, it’s a bus from Narita to Tokyo for me then taxi within the city. I have been to the central Tokyo Station a few times for a bullet train to Niigata. Not many bums laying about there, but I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment of Japan.
When I think of hopeless urban poverty, images of cities within India or Bangladesh flash through my head. That is not discounting destitute African nations, but merely pointing to grossly overpopulated countries with the wealthy going about their business every day and stepping over a grinding poverty that will never be relieved. I repeat never.