Tent city evictions won’t erase the deeper issues

RE: “PETERBOROUGH CITY, COUNTY WANTS TENT CITY OUT OF VICTORIA PARK BY TUESDAY” (AUG. 24)

I visited Peterborough last weekend (Aug. 17-19), as I’m only able to get back on occasion. Our family moved to Winnipeg in 2002, having lived in Norwood for much of the previous decade when I was minister of Norwood United Church and St. Andrew’s United Church, Westwood. Before that, I was born and raised in Peterborough, attending King George and Armour Heights Public Schools, and Thomas A. Stewart Secondary School.

Like most of you, I quickly became aware of the “tent cities” set up at various locations throughout town and the local reaction to the same.

It’s the reaction of Peterborough residents with which I came away feeling rather troubled.

I admit that commenting from a distance is almost always problematic. And yet, I felt, and I feel concern when lines are so quickly drawn between “us” and “them.”

“We” have homes or apartments or condos, and “they” have tents that they’re setting up on public property or in public campgrounds.

“We” pay taxes. “They” take free lunches when offered, resort to aggressive panhandling and bring illegal drugs and add an addiction-infused lifestyle to our fair city.

“Us” and “them”; “We” and “they”; can lines be so conveniently drawn, really?

Another community leader, in another time and place, who also, apparently, was “homeless” or at the very list, “of no fixed address,” was recorded as having said, “The poor you will always have with you.” (Matt 26:11)

How accurately prophetic those words, calling us not to divide the world, or even communities such as Peterborough, into “us” and “them.”

I wonder if the root discomfort I was sensing during my brief visit to the Lift Lock city has more to do with how the presence of homeless encampments reminds us that society is rife with divisions and need not be that way.

Or that the presence of those whose only option for shelter is to erect a perhaps unseemly tent points to not just an individual’s poor choices but society’s choices that have brought about failure to provide adequate food, water and shelter for any and for all?

Also, this points to addictions in whatever form those are manifested, and how these addictions carry both individual and societal determinants.

All of that, and more, raises tough, even unanswerable questions. Or at least to this point, questions that have yet to be answered.

I wonder if that’s what makes us squirm. Indeed, our discomfort is unsettling, perhaps even hard to place. Homeless, in other words.

Whether through a bylaw passed by city council or resolution through the passage of the seasons, this too shall pass.

It always does.

The tough and hauntingly unanswerable questions will remain. I hope those don’t go away once “green spaces” return to the manner by which we’ve grown accustomed to such common spaces being shared.

Perhaps naively, I confess and hope that willingness to engage and explore these questions doesn’t disappear either.

Paul Peters Derry, Winnipeg