30 March 2014

Almost Heaven



Steepleton, a city whose bus drivers are not constantly under physical attack, is where I live. Never thought I would live in Steepleton because it is, as people in Dope City describe it, out in the fucking sticks.

Cows and shit.

Metaphorically (and without conscious intention) I moved back to the motherfucking Alberta of my early childhood when Steepleton became my home.

It was the early years of the New Democratic Party's political control of British Columbia, a province that, like a beat down crack whore, likes to think of itself as Beautiful. There were no homeless people on the streets. Nor were there homeless people in the woods. It was like a John Denver song.

Almost Heaven.

It stayed that way until one year after the fucking Liberals (a political coalition funded by my province's unethical economic elite - the parasitic 1%) got elected. That was when a lot of people, mostly men with few, if any, prospects got kicked off welfare.

Imagine having NO money in a world that worships money the way Muslim loons worship fucking around with airplanes.

Almost Heaven became almost the East End. Stayed that way ever since.

Steepleton, from whence the Fuck You philosophy of the Liberal Party began and continues to fester, has yet to come to grips with the unspeakably poor created and cast aside like stained mattresses at the end of a secluded dead end street. A lesson ought to have been learned by now: do not turn your back on desperate times. To do so only invites such desperation to come bakatcha.

2 comments:

karen said...

Wasn't that about the time that the province closed mental health facilities and sent their residents to be cared for in their underfunded communities?

Mr. Beer N. Hockey said...

If memory serves it was the NDP who freed the prisoners of Riverview. Too bad neither they or the Liberals, who made an even bigger hash of it, followed up the Liberation with the community support necessary to make the former prisoner's transition to a life of Freedom successful and sustainable. Though Freedom is the most important precursor to Freedom it is, even for this Anarchist, difficult to argue for the benefits, the morality, of Freedom for our society's profoundly mentally unstable citizens. Difficult, but not impossible, for I remember too well how sadistically the mentally ill were treated in government institutions.