….and yet the question I have for so many politicians, Christians, business, the wealthy, the homeless, voters is:
Category Archives: This is so Stupid
Fear? Or Business as Usual Dumb?
What is City Council so afraid of being revealed during the court proceedings scheduled to start Monday – four short days from today – that they were about to send in their armed officers, a police force referred to by Justice Kathleen Ker as “a place that time forgot“, to clear the park and avoid having to face a judge on Monday?
Now I do not claim that moving into the parking lot and erecting a 8ft high wooden fence is anything but…….Dumb. But anyone who knows Barry Shantz does not expect strategic thinking. Demands, shouting, aggression, a nobody else matters attitude, disruptive behaviour and provocation – that is what you expect.
As to whoever put up the wooden fence…..with friends like that who needs enemies?
Looking at the walls on television, the homeless ensconced behind the walls and the police outside the walls preparing to attack…….my mind conjured up visions of little boys playing Cowboys [more properly Cavalry] and Indians.
Faced with these new developments the city should have remembered the advice Napoleon gave his Marshals: “the enemy is making a false move, why should we interrupt him?”
The intelligent thing for the city to do was……nothing. Go to court Monday, point to the behaviour that built a walled fort in a public parking lot and say that is why we need the court to order Jubilee Park vacated by these hooligans.
Instead the City seized the excuse and the cover provided by the actions of the homeless with their wall to strike quickly and render the question of court on Monday moot.
Given the lack of reason demonstrated by both sides it is lucky that DJ Larkin from Pivot Legal Society secured a court order. Thereby denying both sides the opportunity to do something incredibly stupid; stupid being an ability both sides have demonstrated having and being willing to use.
Apparently the four days until court on Monday was to long for either side to go without an Act of Stupidity.
Speaking of stupid is as stupid does, watching City Council’s behaviour over the years council has made it abundantly clear that when it comes to dealing with homelessness they like to consume several extra bowls of stupid before dealing with the issue.
The attempt to commit an Act of Stupidity Thursday afternoon is well within councils normal operating procedures. Or perhaps council didn’t want to set a precedent by going to court as though the homeless actually had rights.
Still, one wonders if City Council’s panicky attempt to avoid court by striking to force the homeless out of Jubilee on Thursday was a desperate attempt to avoid the need to appear in court, face a lawyer acting on behalf of the homeless and have………What? come out.
Sigh. If they had just left it be, but NO, city council felt compelled to overreact and focus attention on the homeless hiding behind their walls as the police build their barricades……and those images flash around the world making the City of Abbotsford appear even more ridiculous.
You know this level of weapons grade stupidity is the behaviour one expects from Americans.
Just how low have we sunk, and when did we lose touch with what it was to be Canadian?
One or the Other, but not Both
From James’s ‘That’s So Life’ Files:
At the end of the shift Monday I took the elevator down to the garage to collect my car and head home only to find my car, that had been running perfectly when I arrived, did not want to take me home. Because it was a stick shift I was able to coax it home.
Arriving home I got out of the car, popped the hood and found to my surprise:
It certainly explained the behaviour of the car. Although how the oil cap that was on my car at the time I arrived at work was no longer on my car when I finished work 8 hours later is currently a mystery I would very much like to have solved.
I checked to make sure there was still oil in the engine and there was enough that there was no need, or room, to add more.
Feeling relieved that I had not been running the engine without oil I headed into my place, collected a camera and returned to the car to take photos of what had happened, the problem I needed to address to get my car running again. My plan was to return inside, download the pictures, use the internet to get feedback on the pictures and find transportation to secure a used oil cap from a used parts dealer to replace the missing cap and become mobile again.
All the while keeping my fingers crossed that all I need to do is replace the missing cap to become mobile once more.
I sit down at the computer, download the photographs, started my preferred web browser and………….no Internet.
Not unusual, but when nothing restored access to the internet I got up and checked the television to find that all of my [basic] television channels were “not authorized”.
I turned off the television and sat there waiting for the meteorite to crash down and put me out of my misery, hoping the universe was through playing cat to my mouse.
Wondering if the Universe had realized its error all those decades ago and was resetting to give me the life I had ordered; because this certainly was not the life I had ordered.
When it became clear that the Universe had no intention to either stop with the cat and mouse, or to correct its mistake, reset and give me the life I had ordered – that insidious little black thought crawled out of its containment and whispered about how I did not have to suffer this shit and that, although the car’s none running condition to cement bridge supports out of play, there was that great carving knife I had just found in a Thrift store Monday which would go through flesh like a hot knife through butter……..
………..and decided the wisest course of action was to let it go, go to bed and have a long sleep; dealing with things in a calm, rested manner tomorrow [Tuesday].
Arising Tuesday afternoon I set out for the Library, finding out bus fares were now $2.25. Arriving at the Library I signed onto a computer and made my way to the Shaw website and set up a chat. Shaw wanted payment by credit card because it is immediate cash in their pockets, I will spare you the grizzly details but Shaw was reasonable about getting paid by transfer from my bank account.
Leaving me to exit the Library, return home and make the agreed payment to Shaw.
Then sit down and write about how my day went because I still need to set up transportation to replace the oil cap and contact the shelter to let them know I am currently not mobile and until I can get a new oil cap I cannot get to work to cover any extra shifts.
Not to overlooked the fact writing it down is a way of dealing with, putting it in perspective and letting it go.
It occurs to me that Shaw’s warning system [threatening system] is by automated phone calls. With my phone number currently out of service any call by Shaw’s automated phone system would have gotten the automated message that my phone was out of service to which it would have regurgitated its threats of “pay or else” never recognizing that it was making its threats into thin air.
Now there is an interesting mental image: the human race suddenly dies off. As more and more accounts fall into arrears threatening phone calls are made by automated systems to other automated systems, services are cut off by automated systems setting off more calls made by automated systems to automated systems………and on and on…..and should any alien species pass this way they would find a planet full of automated systems threatening each other in a rising cacophony of……….what may be a fitting epitaph for our current society.
There is a science fiction short story in there as the aliens struggle to understand why the dead alien race built all these automated systems to threaten each other and a few other obvious discrepancies of our society. Only you write it in such a manner that it is not revealed that this is an alien race visiting a human lifeless Planet Earth until the last paragraph.
Which still leaves me with the need to deal with the missing oil cap; a situation that demonstrates the pitfalls of poverty that sit there waiting to dump you into, or back into, homelessness.
It is far harder to move from homeless to housed – and stay housed – in this society, economy, point in time than the general public would think it is. Not because the homeless want to be homeless but because of the barriers to becoming housed and all the things that can happen that become barriers to staying housed.