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I live in a city where rent is very expensive and people are losing a lot of their income from layoffs and downsizing during the pandemic. Ppl are receiving little-to-no financial support from the govt and evictions are proceeding, pushing more ppl into the ranks of the homeless.
When such people try to form encampments to survive, the city sends police to break them up. This despite the fact that shelters have been inadequate in this city for years. There’s not enough, and they are dangerous and uncomfortable places for many people, esp during covid.
I always remind my students that in capitalism we make a choice, as a society, to let people die if they can’t adapt to the market. People die every winter in Toronto as a result of not having a home. We don’t care how it happened, we assure ourselves that it was their own fault.
This is all magnified in the context of the pandemic and it is a measure of the cruelty of our society. We know the system is producing more homelessness - people didn’t suddenly just get more “lazy” - but we accept that the punishment for homelessness may well be death.
And if we are trained into such cruelty/callousness to the struggles of others, we should not be surprised when we find ourselves in crisis and society has nothing to offer us but that same cruelty. This is self-defeating logic in a self-destructing system.
I didn’t mean for this to be a thread so I don’t have a big conclusion except to say that I respect the work so many people do to try to blunt the worst edges of capitalism. But fundamentally this is a doom machine and we need to get serious about fighting for something better.
