Further to the incident with the Commander recounted here last weekend: Some didn’t think it was as amusing as I did.
Fair enough. Readers are entitled to make their own judgments. It’s not for the writer to second-guess what people are making of the words.
But there was one reader who disagreed with the tone based on his long experience living in the James Bay neighbourhood where my encounter took place. The points he made are worth passing on, because they shed more light on the issues behind the brief moment I described.
Briefly, it involved seeing an older gent fall over on the sidewalk and calling 911, then spending some time with him until the ambulance arrived. He was an inebriated older man, wearing a dirty navy officer’s cap. His argumentative critique of my small effort to help was so unexpected that it verged on comical. I recounted the tale with some amusement. The paramedics were very familiar with him.
The kicker at the end was the fact that he fell over again the next day, and some bystanders tried to help him again.
The James Bay reader was one of them. He got covered in urine after grabbing the man under the arms and dragging him off the street, then helping swing his legs up on a bench. He told another helper on the phone to the dispatcher to inform them that it was the same man who prompts an ambulance call almost weekly.
He stayed with the other people who were helping until the ambulance arrived, then went home and put his clothes in the wash and had a shower.
“This story plays out again and again with almost the same guys daily,” he wrote me. They are chronic alcoholics, for the most part, who sometimes smell of vomit and urine. They spend some time at Irving Park on Menzies Street. My correspondent notes that there is a children’s playground there as well, and walkways are used daily by shoppers. Dirty clothes, empty bottles and cigarette butts are a common feature, he said.
“Why are little kids exposed to that?” he asked. “Why do seniors doing their shopping have to weave through that scene?
“Who is responsible for keeping the lid on that public park? Why do we have to run a gauntlet day after day?
“Why is it that ambulances beat a steady path to the same place, doing the same job week after week?
“How much does it cost us taxpayers to finance this bulls---, week after week, year after year?”
He expressed dismay about the range of city employees — from councillors to police to parks crews — who don’t do much about the problem. “Everyone shoves the responsibility to someone else. Nobody makes any decisions to actually deal with such an obvious, ongoing problem, not only for us adults, but especially for the little ones playing there.”
His frustration doesn’t transfer into hostility toward the alcoholics and addicts. The correspondent called it a tragic human problem that is getting worse.
I’ve walked the neighbourhood he describes for so long that it’s hard to say when panhandlers became a fixture on Menzies Street. But they have been for years now. And the James Bay problem is just a small example of what’s going on in other parks, downtown and on Pandora Avenue. That’s despite considerable attention over the the years on homelessness, alcoholism and drug addiction.
The cost that he questioned can’t be quantified. But there’s one B.C. example that hints at the scope. It’s in the inquiry into the case of Frank Paul, a homeless alcoholic who died after his case was mishandled in Vancouver. The inquiry found his hospital record was 2,024 pages long. It included 160 hospital visits, and 121 ambulance calls in the last three years of his life. He was booked into detox 82 times over 16 years.
Much of the attention focused on how the last call was bungled and he died of exposure.
Equally disturbing is that none of the hundreds of earlier interventions did any good.
