Oh, the horror — the hippies are back
The Sixties are back. When I see protesters attacking police for trying to move homeless people out of Toronto public park camps and into shelters, I see shadows of a passionate adherence to a failed ideal. I sense Summer of Love overhang.
The protesters at the Allan Lamport Stadium park encampment on King Street West mean well but they haven’t yet hit the wall of an eternal problem. What is to be done about people in a terrible state living in tents allegedly by choice?
I have noticed a recent tendency to glamourize things like mental illness, drug abuse, anti-masking, anti-vaxxing, tiny wooden fire trap boxes for the homeless, and so on as questions of freedom. What freedom?
As the Star has reported, these illegal camps are populated by frightened people, some dangerous, who frighten each other and people who pass by. There have been hundreds of fires, with one death in February and another last year.
As city officials have said repeatedly, they offer care to people living outside, providing housing, shelter space, food, health care, respite sites, wellness checks, mask distribution, help finding work, and soon, cooling centres. Recently, Toronto police were filmed rescuing a man from falling to his death at the Roehampton shelter downtown. Everywhere there is a helping hand.
So why do social justice activists want the homeless to stay put? Because some homeless people say they do, even if they are unwell and hardly the best judge of their own welfare? Protesters, not as woke as they think they are, were arrested for trespassing and assaulting cops rather than doing something useful and taking people into their own home. I’m not sure what cause protesters ultimately serve although they are cement-based certain that it is admirable.
The pandemic has killed, stricken, isolated and financially damaged so many Canadians. Many of us are frightened and not thinking clearly, vulnerable to antique flower-power notions about personal freedom.
Anti-masking and anti-vaxxing aren’t freedom, they’re a matter of blithe disregard about the health of others. Drug abuse isn’t freedom, it’s a brief vacation from emotional pain that turns into a life sentence. Mental illness is not freedom, it’s pain and bewilderment for everyone, and medications can be punishing.
The last time there was a mass movement to do whatever you wanted in order to explore your personal greatness was the 1960s. It left a residue, one of them being the wellness movement, with good things like yoga and physical exercise, and bad things like Gwyneth Paltrow merchandising and people droning on about their inner specialness, rarely apparent to others.
LSD is back in microdosing form. People use cannabis, which is fine because at least now they don’t burn the kilim, they just swallow a pill and enjoy.
“Clearing encampments is a colonial process,” one religionist stated, as if Canadians haven’t consented to live together governed by laws. Indigenous people have the right to complain about “settlers” but white people using it as a pejorative sounds a bit “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” a Sixties remark that faded when hippies aged out.
One man being taken from the Lamport encampment was charmingly candid as he talked to a Star reporter about living in shelters. “I just don’t like staying there,” he said. “A lot of characters there, a lot of bad characters. Drug dealers. Drug addicts. Myself included, but I’m not like that. And it’s just safer for me here.”
He sounds sensible. Activists sound prescriptive.
David Sedaris, 64, wrote it was terrible his generation will die off. Someone has to be alive to remember “who George Raft was, or what hippies smelled like.” I have grown wary of older boomers professing universal love but inflicting social damage in the guise of freedom for all.
Homeless people stuck in tents aren’t emblems. They are people, they are casualties, who deserve every good thing we can give them. That doesn’t include the freedom to live in fear and burn up in the night in a tiny wooden coffin-houselet.