Here is something a little eerie to think about.

A friend, a homeless friend, mentioned he had been to Mill Lake but it was getting to depressing to go there and see all the tombstones, especially those for children.

Haven’t seen any tombstones at Mill Lake? Or just haven’t noted them as tombstones.

They are hard to miss being spread around the lake and rather large, large enough to sit on. Yes the benches with their memorial plaques.

Is not a tombstone a memorial, usually but not always of stone, with an inscription noting the passing of someone?

A little something to ponder as you stroll around Mill Lake, past the tombstones.

It certainly caused me a discombobulating moment and a little pondering. The next time I find myself at Mill Lake watching the waterfowl I just may find myself sitting on the stone wall instead of the adjacent benches/tombstones.

I did say it was a little eerie.

bureaucrat Hope slays
knowledge news Wellness unshared
Light illumes no more

The Advisor was the regional mental health and addictions advisory committee’s 12 page newsletter published and edited by a consumer for consumer and family education and empowerment.

June’s issue touched on Father’s Day, listening, had 2 pages devoted to relapse prevention, coping strategies, suicide, things to think about, ask a pharmacist, happenings around the region and listings of the services and support available in the communities of the region.

I hand it out as part of the support discussion at Wellness Recovery Action Plan groups; others ask about it if delivery is late; it was distributed around our communities so that those who needed it could find it and all copies were long gone before the next month’s publication was out.

It was a valuable resource and tool that provided, due to the hard work and volunteer efforts of the editor, benefits far outweighing the amazingly cheap $3,000 yearly cost for production of a monthly newsletter.

It died an ignoble death at the hands of a faceless, carelessly thoughtless bureaucrat who, with the stroke of a pen and a no, snuffed out the Light that was the Advisor.

We could well lose the bureaucrat unnoticed

The Advisor is a painful loss that will be missed.

Reading Mr. Rushton’s poppycock of Tuesday June 3, 2008 about the people on the traffic islands with the begging signs was an experience containing incredible irony.

Irony abounds in the fact the homeless themselves distain these individuals with their signs seeking handouts because it re-enforces the prejudicial stereotyping of the homeless by the public, pundits and columnists.

It is also ironic that in rushing to make his sweeping and sophistic assertions, Mr. Rushton becomes the answer to his editor’s question with which he began his column.

Yes Ms. Editor, there are poverty (or homelessness) pimps out there; people who exploit the poor and homeless for their own economic ends and advantage, earning their thirty pieces of silver catering to the public’s uninformed view of the poor and homeless to fill their newspaper column space – without the need to think.

I do not suggest that Mr. Rushton pimps the poor and homeless to the public because he came down on the people with the signs. Knowing the story behind many of these individuals I too wanted to kick their asses out of there or stand there with a sign saying “Does not deserve your generosity”.

It is his broad, careless and misleading statements about how easy it is to find employment that, together with his apparent failure to apply any form of analytical thought process to these statements, render him a poverty (homelessness) pimp.

Try applying for a job when you are homeless and watch the employers reaction to that information – don’t call us we’ll call you. How does an employer willing to take the chance and hire the homeless contact the homeless person? Smoke signals? Jungle drums? Homeless and broke how do you manage personal hygiene, clean clothes etc to remain presentable enough to keep your job? With a job and thus unable to get to the Food Bank or the Salvation Army, is it Mr. Rushton’s belief that you pretty much starve for the three weeks until you get your first pay check?

Just how good a job of grunt work are you going to be doing on an empty stomach, at the end of the first week? Second week? Third week?

Jobs abound? Really? As I sit here I cannot think of any job that is available within the area I could walk to and from work. You are homeless, without transportation, living in Abbotsford a city where transit is of limited use – even if you could afford the $3 a day cost.

Here is an interesting problem that some Abbotsford citizens may already be facing and that more and more will face as gas prices continue to rise. You commute from Abbotsford to Vancouver daily. Lease or loan payments, insurance, repairs and maintenance and gas with its soaring prices – one may well find oneself spending more to get and from work than one is making as take home pay.

The job is there … or is it really there if it costs you more to commute to work than you make at work? A little conundrum that increasing numbers of commuters may face as gas spirals upward in cost.

Conundrums are what many homeless face in seeking employment.

Despite the baseless assertions to the contrary, finding employment for the poor and especially for the homeless is to run into barrier after barrier after barrier after barrier ….

I recently heard from someone who was on the verge of homelessness after a year of fruitless job searching having been repeatedly told she was “overqualified” for the job she was applying for. I know others, including myself, who have a stack of rejections on the grounds of being “overqualified”.

As for the woman seeking money for dog grooming tools, consider the following scenario. You’re poor and cannot afford new clothes; you have a job lined up but in order to meet the office dress code you need two pair of Khaki pants; so much for that job because you cannot get those pants – unless you can find someone of charitable consciousness to buy you those pants. This is not some impossible scenario – it happened to me.

When one is poor and/or homeless the statement “jobs abound” is often false and what abounds is multiple barriers, multiple layers of barriers, between employment and you, between housing and you.

The homeless derive no benefit from their homelessness. Benefits accrue to those who chose, by their behaviours and actions, to be poverty and homelessness pimps – a rather shameful irony.