Thanks, Victoria Adams, for an entertaining and energetic response to my column, but if your intellectual excursion is intended as a counter-argument, if it takes issue with what I’ve written, instead of just being a riff of its own, I’m at a loss to understand your points.
In a lengthy, almost-Darwinian (and hopefully ironic) narrative, you go on about the rich and powerful setting the rules for urban development and appear, at one or more points, to paint a picture of our mayor, Lisa Helps, as the tool of such interests, eager to sanitize Victoria’s streets, or at least complicit with that objective. Your words: “What’s the Mayor’s 21st century vision of Victoria? An exclusive enclave for wealthy home-owners and tourists flush with cash.”
Helps, of course, is nothing of the sort. She deservedly celebrates the triumph of a new, emergent, thousands-strong downtown residential population (just count the development sites!) which will invigorate (read: save) downtown’s shops and services, but also communicates (and practices) nothing but concern and care for the street population and its challenges and hardships. She’s a tireless advocate.
Ditto this column, which advocates for a greater and more successful response to the basic needs of the homeless and rootless. It’s my read of social history that such problems, if left to grow, do so at broader society’s peril—a point that I thought I made explicit when I wrote: “Look, leaving moral resonances or questions of social obligation aside, the sheer economic costs of homelessness and empty-pocketed poverty...are mountainous;” and “There is also another potent and very real, if un-priceable, cost: the social poisoning of our civic community...a pernicious eating away at Victoria’s identity, social coherence and sense of mission;” and “Yes, homelessness and soul-crushing poverty are our community’s shame.”
I’m not trying to suggest that Victoria, in your words “should be immune to problems of poverty, pain and social turmoil.” We’re a city, this is life. I’m simply proposing that we can do a better, more effective job of alleviating poverty, pain and social turmoil—not to sanitize the city, but to humanize it.
Please, re-read my column (less reactively and judgmentally), take in its values and sensibilities, and give me a call. Coffee’s on me.
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Community is perishable
in Focus Magazine March/April 2017
Posted
Thanks, Victoria Adams, for an entertaining and energetic response to my column, but if your intellectual excursion is intended as a counter-argument, if it takes issue with what I’ve written, instead of just being a riff of its own, I’m at a loss to understand your points.
In a lengthy, almost-Darwinian (and hopefully ironic) narrative, you go on about the rich and powerful setting the rules for urban development and appear, at one or more points, to paint a picture of our mayor, Lisa Helps, as the tool of such interests, eager to sanitize Victoria’s streets, or at least complicit with that objective. Your words: “What’s the Mayor’s 21st century vision of Victoria? An exclusive enclave for wealthy home-owners and tourists flush with cash.”
Helps, of course, is nothing of the sort. She deservedly celebrates the triumph of a new, emergent, thousands-strong downtown residential population (just count the development sites!) which will invigorate (read: save) downtown’s shops and services, but also communicates (and practices) nothing but concern and care for the street population and its challenges and hardships. She’s a tireless advocate.
Ditto this column, which advocates for a greater and more successful response to the basic needs of the homeless and rootless. It’s my read of social history that such problems, if left to grow, do so at broader society’s peril—a point that I thought I made explicit when I wrote: “Look, leaving moral resonances or questions of social obligation aside, the sheer economic costs of homelessness and empty-pocketed poverty...are mountainous;” and “There is also another potent and very real, if un-priceable, cost: the social poisoning of our civic community...a pernicious eating away at Victoria’s identity, social coherence and sense of mission;” and “Yes, homelessness and soul-crushing poverty are our community’s shame.”
I’m not trying to suggest that Victoria, in your words “should be immune to problems of poverty, pain and social turmoil.” We’re a city, this is life. I’m simply proposing that we can do a better, more effective job of alleviating poverty, pain and social turmoil—not to sanitize the city, but to humanize it.
Please, re-read my column (less reactively and judgmentally), take in its values and sensibilities, and give me a call. Coffee’s on me.
Gene Miller, 250-514-2525