When I was younger I was unaware that there was a conflict in the world between the needs of the individual, and the needs of society.

It wasn’t that I missed the point that some people were poor while others were not, in fact I was very much aware of it since my mother sometimes took me with her when she was involved in ‘The Duchess Street Mission’ in Toronto.

I had, until I reached me teens, always assumed that everyone started off in life as equals. I wasn’t even aware that racism existed in the world, one of my favorite babysitters when I was a child was African American, and this was not unusual as far as I knew, unlike a child raised in southern US of A.

I just assumed that those people that were poor I had met at the mission, were poor as a result of bad luck, or personal mistakes they had made in their life (i.e.: drinking to much).

As a result of these assumptions, it had occurred to me that “poor” people might need help not to be “poor”, but there was also the underlining reasoning that since they were also equals; they could, by virtue of their own effort, leave poverty on their own.

I was raised to be an evangelical Christian, and by the time I started into being a teenager I started to realize that there must be more wrong with the world then just bad luck and bad choices. Because of the influence of the church I had adopted the Christian worldview, that being which, what was wrong with the world was a lack of Christian faith and values, in people’s personal lives. A lack of a personal savior in Christ.

I had always assumed that the church was the active arm of god.

Being the active arm of god, meant to me, that it was the church’s responsibility to protect, and care for, those whom had not been raised with the benefits of faith in Jesus, nor the freedom of living under god’s rule.

If some one had been poor as a result of bad luck for example, (bad luck meaning by this time in my life as a fall from grace), it was the churches responsibility to care and provided for them until they could do so on their own.

I was sixteen, when I met “Mouse” on the streets of Toronto.

It was a complete culture shock to me to find an eleven-year-old child selling her body on the streets of Toronto for food.

Regardless of whom I contacted, no one was willing or able to help her. Neither church nor state, so to speak. It was my first involvement in a real social issue; it was the hallmark of becoming an activist. Activists do not choose the causes they get involved in the issues choose them.

These events made me aware that the world was not as candy coated as it first appeared to me. So I started to look deeper into the issues that I had noticed.

Poverty is born into for the most part, it is not a result of bad luck, nor is it a result of bad choices most of the time. It travels like a meme from one generation to the next and is a direct result of the type of economic system we are currently using. It is an inherit part of the industrial age, a gear in the capitalist paradigm machine.

Basic human rights are by definition, basic to everyone equally. They must be accessible, applied too, and defended. Anything that, by it’s nature, opposes or works against basic human rights must be fought against with all the effort, and means one can raise. The industrial age was/is a cancer on this planet, the capitalist is a tyrant, and organized religion is an enemy of freedom, they must be fought in the home, in the streets, and at every level of the government.

Even our (Canada) FPTP election system itself, even the government itself, must be replaced.

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Friday, 24 June 2005
When I was younger I was unaware that there was a conflict in the world between the needs of the individual, and the needs of society. It wasn’t...

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