Each gift a moment of kindness in mean world
We knocked. The hallway stretched both ways, fluorescent and grey, in one of the massive buildings that hulk next to the highway. I could hear a baby. Someone said, “Who is it?” and I said, “The Toronto Star Santa Claus Fund. A gift.” I remember the young lady who opened the door, a three-year-old hugging her leg, steam from the kitchen rising behind her, the baby crying. She looked uncertain. One of my twins handed her the box, wrapped like a Christmas present.
She accepted it and smiled, a little confused. She said thank you, in rough English. My kids waved to her kid. She closed the door. We took the elevator down.
It was a nice thing. It feels like a long time ago, but it’s not.
It’s been a rough year, and it’s going to get worse. So many people are struggling, and winter feels like a cold dark maw, waiting. It might be harder, now, to ask for your help.
But the Star needs help. Last year, the Star’s Santa Claus Fund sent out 45,000 gift boxes to families that needed them, to kids that need them, for Christmas. We hope to do the same thing this year, with your help.
The Star has been delivering gifts to underprivileged children in Toronto since 1906. This year the fundraising goal is $1.2 million; we are also looking for volunteers to deliver them, and you can email scfvolunteer@thestar.ca for that.
The boxes are simple. Some warm clothing — winter mitts, toques and socks — along with toys, candy and a book. It’s not extravagant. But it is kindness, and generosity. It’s something for kids who might not get anything. Maybe it’s harder to ask, now.
Or maybe not. The pandemic has been a mirror in so many ways, and Toronto’s reflection is clear. The first-wave lockdowns started here March 23. And at that moment the city, already divided in ways we have learned to largely ignore, diverged into different worlds.
As the Star’s Kate Allen, Jennifer Yang, Rachel Mendelson and Andrew Bailey reported, if you lived in one of the 20 highest-income neighbourhoods in the city or one of the 20 whitest neighbourhoods in the city, the curve flattened, and your chances of contracting COVID-19 fell. And of course, even in this global city, those neighbourhoods are largely the same places.
And if you lived in the other world — one of the 20 lowestincome neighbourhoods in the city or one of the 20 neighbourhoods with the highest percentage of visible minorities — the lockdown took things away without making you any safer. Cases, in those neighbourhood, continued to climb.
Pandemics have always found the vulnerable. Frank Snowden of Yale University wrote the book “Epidemics and Society: From The Black Plague To The Present,” and as he told the Star, “It shows our economic situation: that happened in the Spanish influenza, it happened in the Black Death. And it’s happening now with coronavirus: for example, what happens to people who are furloughed, who lose their jobs, who don’t have any savings? What happens to homeless people, to people in residences for the seniors? All those people are at great risk, and their risk, people seem to forget, puts the rest of the population at risk as well.
“The truth is that we’re all interconnected, and we’re in this together.”
Yes, and no. The disease started with affluent Canadians, often Canadians who had travelled for spring break, and then the virus moved. More and more hospitals saw taxi drivers, immigrant labourers, personal-service workers making $15 an hour to take care of your grey-haired parents. They saw food-service workers, factory workers, essential workers who weren’t paid like it. They saw a disproportionate number of new Canadians, of people of colour, of the working poor. And often, people who couldn’t avoid giving it to their family, if they brought it home.
And I thought about that young woman, and what COVID-19 would do if it found her. What would you do if you caught it at the job you couldn’t afford not to work, and a few days later, you started to cough? If you lived in one of those apartments with one bathroom, with a three-yearold hugging your leg and a baby on your hip? If a grandmother or grandfather lived with you, too, in a city where the money level keeps rising, and lifeboats are hard to find?
This week the Public Health Agency of Canada released its report on the state of public health in Canada, and it wrote, “This pandemic has demonstrated that inequities in our society place some populations — and ultimately, all Canadians at risk. No one is protected from the risk of COVID-19 until everyone is protected.” Even now, the hardest-hit areas of Toronto have the lowest testing rates.
This week Toronto Public Health announced new initiatives in Etobicoke North, York South-Weston and Humber River-Black Creek, three of the neighbourhoods hit hardest by the virus. Pop-up testing, popup flu clinics, some small isolation spaces for COVID-positive people who can’t effectively isolate, increased publichealth education, internetconnectivity support, money to address food insecurity, and more.
They did it because people need help.
And you can do your part, too. It’s a small thing, and it’s not. The Canadians who might need this already did, and they probably need it more now than ever. Santa Claus Fund gifts are kindness in a mean world. The pandemic is a mirror, and some of us should be able to look and see how lucky we are, and how grateful we should be for that. And how, in this way and others, we can help.