Montreal City Weblog

Kate 09:29 on 2020-05-21 Permalink Reply  

• david1202 21:09 on 2020-05-21 Permalink

  I’m, of course, highly unsympathetic to wacked out druggies going publicly nuts and, of course, equally unsympathetic to the police doing make-work by getting a dozen officers to take said wacked out druggie into custody.

  But isn’t the true crime here than they pulled down, rather that reconverted, the gloomy children’s hospital building?

• Michael Black 22:14 on 2020-05-21 Permalink

  She said she wanted to kill herself. David Chapman of Resilience talked to her for a while, and she finally agreed to go to the hospital. But when he called for an ambulance, all the cops and dogs arrived. Arrest wasn’t part of the scenario, but they showed up in force.

  Whether or not she was on drugs, it may be a reaction rather than cause of her being homeless. And the people who hang around Cabot Square can’t be dismissed by categorizing them all together. The Inuk woman I gave a donut to two years ago seemed sober , and it wasn’t the only time I saw her. They can’t all be seen as tragedy, but so much was taken, so much was lost.

• dwgs 07:44 on 2020-05-22 Permalink

  @david0 that’s a strange take for a guy who in the past has claimed that to be all about keeping housing affordable. Lucky for you if you’ve never been exposed to life at the margins of society, it usually isn’t pretty but the people who inhabit it feel and act like any other person. Plenty of well off people have episodes where they overindulge and threaten to self harm as well. The only difference is that they get sent quietly to rehab or a psychologist or the drama just happens behind the walls of an expensive home rather than in a public park.

• Kate 09:05 on 2020-05-22 Permalink

  dwgs, Michael Black, thank you both for countering david1202’s cruel comment.

• david22 19:09 on 2020-05-22 Permalink

  I don’t know – for me, “cruel” is deliberately gentrifying Cabot square instead of turning that hospital into a place these down-and-outs could live, as I was raving about back when they closed, prepared to sell, sold, planned to demolish, and demolished.

• david22 19:11 on 2020-05-22 Permalink

  And I’d add that “cruel” is letting some wacked out druggie live on the streets and disturb the peace (and commit crimes against people) because of some guilt we feel based on her race, situation, status, whatever. This person shouldn’t be on the street in any way if they’re a harm to themselves, others, or the public peace.

• Kate 10:05 on 2020-05-23 Permalink

  The fate of Cabot Square is neither here nor there. You’re calling a vulnerable person by a nasty phrase, and I don’t like it.

  This “wacked out druggie” – as you persist in calling her – is a displaced person. But she is still an adult and generally regarded as having the right to make her own decisions in life, even ones that other people may see as unwise, until she endangers others or herself.

  We (I speak for white people generally here) have never done well when we claimed the right to decide how people from other cultures were to live their lives, and I don’t think we should try to reassert that right. Our failing as a culture is in not learning how to listen and learn from other cultures but, as here, to send in the troops.