When you hear of Winnipeg's Main Street, images of poverty, homeless and the pitiful. There are Winnipeggers who drive around the area just to take photos of people at their most vulnerable and desperate. You can see their efforts proudly displayed on social media sites. One of those sites is People of Winnipeg on Zuckerberg's (also referred to as the world's worst human) Meta platform. This page is filled with the ugliness of being poor, being on the streets, being vulnerable, and it is a page made to show how we can make fun of the poor, how much we hate them and how we ridicule them.
We don't like to encounter the poor do we? We see them in their ragged clothes, their unclean look, the stench of rotting flesh, festering opening wounds, dripping puss, dried blood, and the indignity of not washing. We are repulsed. We don't want the stench to get on us. We don't want to touch their hands as they reach out for a "hand-out." If we do give them coin-change, we make sure to drop it in their hand or even drop it on the ground, because we fear the chance of getting the poverty touch us. We want them out of our space as quickly as possible. If we had our way, we would never see them.
We are not afraid to voice our visceral disgust of the poor. We know the majority of people share the same sentiments. The poor are to be despised, to be ridiculed, to be removed from our neighborhoods, our communities and our society. To us, the poor, the homeless, are maggots just living off the carcasses of dead streets. They are just festering scabs on the concrete which we hold dear. We do not want the reminder of how unfair the world is, and the poor remind us of the inequities of society.
The other day I was driving on Main Street, right in the heart of the poor. There was a gathering of people outside one of the shelters. As I drove by I saw ambassadors of goodwill working on a person. The person was laid out not moving, while the good will ambassadors were trying to revive the person. The ambulance and police were just arriving as I got the intersection greenlight. It is the reminder of what happens to the poor. Either they just go on with existing or they die, we don't know or do we care.
"Not In My Neighborhood" is a good clean mantra to use. The poor can exist but not around me, around us. "Out of sight, out of mind." We have so many cute idioms to keep us clean from the ugliness that we are. It is not the poor that we hate, it us we hate. We are the cruel, the ugly, the true maggots of society. The poor are the measuring sticks we use to feel we are doing well in society. We look at the rich and long to be them. We put the rich of pedestals, we worship, we watch their every move, we try to dress as they do, we carry our little Chihuahua's in bags because the rich do that. We watch tv shows and collect magazines of the "lives of the rich and famous" and it is our bible. We are the decrepit, the ugly, the morally repugnant. We look at the rich, we see we are not in their universe of decadence. We say to ourselves, at least we are not poor.
I fucking hate the rich.
