Downtown Eastside#
Downtown Eastside (DTES), reputed as Canada’s poorest postcode, is the place I understand as the nation’s dumping ground. People unwanted for whatever reason end up there. With the best intentions caring friends cautioned of safety, pleading, “Please don’t go there!” But I spent more time there than all friends added together. Weekends and holidays I combed DTES street by street till I dropped. Nobody ever touched me. No needle[1] ever pricked me. Those safety warnings are of the best intentions, of plain discrimination. The idea that DTES is dangerous is a divisive gulf of unsubstantiated suspicion, demeaning curiosity and unjustified fear.
Fears come in different flavors, some with more contact with reality than others. The unjustified fear that communities on our streets pose danger is at the end of the scale where the contact with reality is really too thin (or I wouldn’t have been getting home unscathed from DTES). Campers on the streets are no more dangerous than you and I. By a fear that has little contact with reality—just because some feel scared—we cast full cohorts to a state of defeat, and we condemn a section of our society to living hell.
This is not trivial. We are dealing with a serious matter here. It is not about having nothing to eat or having no place to sleep. But having nowhere to be. From this side to the next and the next, from this corner to the next and the next, from this end to the next and the next, we tell them to go away. People have nowhere to be.
I don’t know how sins are classified (mortal, immortal, venial, contempt against the Holy Spirit, heinous negative karmas of immediate retribution, …) For all I know when lives have nowhere to be, and we find ourselves somewhere upstream in the cause-and-effect, that can be as serious as a sin can possibly be.
DTES is a place very close to heart not because I spent many hours of many days of many months there but because DTES authored within me the meaning of community. People look out for each other from this corner to the next. RCMP was part of the closely knit community; knowing each other by the first name. It was a community that was sensitive to each other’s dependability as much as fragility.