Obscured by self… (by Guest blogger Pat Capponi)
We are the intractable poor, those who’ve been years- sometimes decades on OW or ODSP, whose world is limited to agencies, drop-ins, food banks, Money Marts, and some of the worst housing Toronto has on offer. Men and women with no future, no hope, broken by the struggle to simply survive, whose lives and deaths cause barely a ripple, no obituaries, no weeping relatives, no sign we were ever here, except for thick files in dusty cabinets, destined for shredders, in order to make room for new files, new clients, who will share the same sad fate. We are the cast-offs, the social irritants, lying on grates through the winter, hanging in back alleyways, servicing Johns, on street corners pleading for change, lined up for hours for a loaf of…