A snarling, growling police dog lunging at your face in an apparent desire to rip it off, has to rank high on the list of really bad wakeup calls.

One supposes it is easier to intimidate the homeless when you wake them out of a peaceful sleep in the night to find a police dog straining to attack them. Their focus tends to be on the leash that is all that is keeping them from being mauled.

In case the threat of their trained attack dog is not enough to drive the homeless to find a new camping ground somewhere else, the police threatened to unleash a beast that strikes fear into any citizen who has the misfortune to become its prey – the bylaw enforcement officers.

Yes, the police told their sleep-befuddled victim that if the camp was not abandoned they would set the bylaw officers loose and all the victim’s meagre possessions would garbaged – leaving the victim helplessly exposed to the life-threatening wet and cold elements of the weather. This police statement would appear to confirm the reports made of bylaw officers looting and destroying homeless person’s possessions all over the city.

What heinous crime have these homeless people committed? Existence – worse: the audacity to exist and camp in Abbotsford and camp.

Some kids out exploring/playing/ looking for ???, had come across the camp and been “freaked out” at finding a homeless person existed in their neighbourhood. The Parents phoned the police to run off the homeless – presumably uncaring where the homeless go as long as it’s NIMBY.

Sorry, but I have to inform that this behaviour will not work. Because in some other neighbourhood some other citizen is having the police harass the homeless out of THEIR backyard. Consequently even as a homeless person is displaced from one neighbourhood, another homeless person displaced from some other neighbourhood is moving into the abandoned camp.

The pointlessness of continually wasting taxpayer’s hard-earned money to chase the homeless in endless circles around Abbotsford is not, as important point as it is, the major point we as a city, as a society, should be troubled by. Neither is the ethical questions raised by using trained police dogs to hunt down, find the camps and harass the homeless in the middle of the night.

No what I want the reader to think about is the lessons we are teaching our kids by this behaviour and the effect these lessons will have on them and the society they will make. Consider as well what this behaviour says about us and the society the kids will inherit from us.

Kindness, compassion, help, love? NO, not in this neighbourhood. People are continually complaining about the behaviour of kids today. Think about where and who they learned these decried behaviours from.

How are we teaching them to address problems and issues? Denial, pretend it does not exist or drive it into someone else’s backyard and hope they solve it. This behaviour teaches them nothing about taking responsibility, facing problems full on and thoughtfully dealing with them.

People make fun of and laugh about suits brought by children against their parents for the way they were raised. I am beginning to think that kids today have a legitimate right to sue their parents for failing to raise them in a manner that equipped them to deal with the problems and challenges they will inherit; part of the first generation of children that will inherit a world of less opportunity, lesser dreams, squandered resources and a failing ecology from their parents.