...make sure you go to all your favorite meal programs in the days leading up to the holiday!
They will not inform you by e-mail or text message of any changes in their program or any special holiday programming.
They might offer any sort of helpful list of alternate meal programs on the door, but the information may not be correct.
They think that their clients don't have internet access, even though they provide it and recognize it as a need.
They think that their clients don't have cellphones, even though they have several of their clients' cellphone numbers.
They will not put even their regular program schedule on their website, and where they do, it's probably inaccurate, and they don't necessarily update it, and they make sure not to note when updates were last made.
They think that setting up an email mailing list is something that they don't have the time, technology or budget for. They actually think it takes time, technology and a budget to set up an email mailing list. They actually, factually think that. They have said that to me.
So. I am an absolutely starving, housed, very internet-connected person. I am starving on a holiday because this is the first day in a few weeks where I have desperately needed free food. Somebody decided to skip work early at the beginning of this long weekend, so I couldn't get paid then, and they arranged to pay me today, but then took the day off, and didn't tell me.
So, of course I am totally responsible for spending all my money on food already. I guess I should have rationed it. I guess I should have bought cheaper food. I guess I should have combined soup kitchens with groceries. But I didn't want to combine them, because I didn't think I'd have to go back to that at all, and I didn't want to, because, ok, I've changed my attitude about these places. The food is often really, really terrible. Even when it's not, it's a sad, '50s Christian approach to food: half of it is red meat. Vegetables are tomatoes, potatoes, and lettuce. This is a good way to make sick people sicker and mentally ill people turn crazy.
So... if someone were to say, let's make a recipe, a blueprint, for a perfect social disintegration, this would definitely be a good piece of the puzzle.
Happy fucking Easter Monday, Government of Canada, you filthy slime. I'm fucking starving. My stomach hurts like crazy and I am coming closer and closer to committing burglary of food. Fuck you. Fuck your assumptions about what makes someone unable to afford food, what their lives are like, their opportunities, how close they are to success and danger, their needs, their fucking innocence!!!
I am not going to condemn the volunteers who work at these places. They are ignorant, not irresponsible. I point the finger straight at the government, because it is specifically their responsibility to not let their ignorance get in the way of good governance. It's up to them to identify and ameliorate any ignorance or assumptions they make. They screw up all the time, of course, but it's their responsibility to deal with that too.
I have spent, I don't know, 100 hours on this site. Maybe. I should have cataloged it. I was working on it quickly here and there, on resource center computers which will probably be gone by this time next year. Hopefully my hunger doesn't get me into an angry state, which I fall for and alienate my employers, and I won't have to go and see all those resource centers closed down with no notification or anything. That would break my heart.
I'm gonna restate this one thing: if someone were to invest a lot of time and money developing a strategy for the disintegration of society, this problem would fit well into that plan. It's a small piece, but they all count. They all disintegrate us.
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