Download or Order ‘A Poverty of Perspective’

I originally set out to write a much longer book, and this booklet was intended to be a preview/sampler of that longer book. I discovered in the course of putting this together that the longer book will be taking a much different direction…

So this is the (somewhat) finished result of what I set out to publish. I don’t know how much it will shift your perspective of poverty (as advertised in this article in the Martlett), but it might just give you some food for thought.

Poverty is the one of the oldest and most complicated issues of our civilization. This 52 page book does not attempt to offer ‘solutions’, but is merely a collection of educated opinion.

This project is a fund-raiser for my own personal struggle with poverty…

First printing April 30, 2012
Order using the form below and donate (pay what you can) using the donate button.
Add $1.00 for postage, or if you are in ‘Greater Victoria’, I can hand deliver.

You can also download it here, and send a donation if you’d like, or enjoy it for free.

Name(required)

Email(required)

How many copies, method of payment, and how to get them to you?(required)

Downtown garbage cans as a source of food

I’m not sure if there is a name for scavenging food from public trash receptacles. It’s not quite dumpster diving, and I wouldn’t call it canning either, as that usually refers to collecting refundable cans.

Whatever it’s called, it paid off for me today perfectly.

I left the house early today to do some work for a friend. My food supply at home is limited to rice, beans, noodles, quinoa, potatoes and tomato sauce. I woke up a half hour before I had to leave, and there was no time to cook any of that, and besides, I can’t eat when I first get up.

So I figured I’d check the garbage cans when I got downtown. This is something I’ve resorted to on many occasions. Usually, a check into a hundred or so garbage cans downtown will eventually yield unfinished take-out food, half eaten bags of chips and if you’re collecting cans, a buck or two worth. I don’t mind that I’m highly visibile while I do this. The downtown core is filled with decadence and conspicuous consumption, which is far more disgusting to me. I like to remind the sheeple and tourists that poverty exists in our lovely little city, and that people are going to desperate measures to survive.

Easy Intro to Homemade Bio-fuels – Part One: Biodiesel

A plain language explanation of Biodiesel and Straight Vegetable Oil technology. No auto repair experience required.

This intro is going to focus on diesel engines, and oil based fuels. Ethanol and other homemade fuels can be used in gasoline engines, but I have less experience/knowledge of that, and will save it for another essay.

This is not meant to be a step-by-step tutorial, but more of an introduction to and explanation of the process. There are many tutorials online. Here’s a good one (How to Make Biodiesel at Home). There’s a great online forum as well. (Biodiesel and SVO forums)

Avoid the site Journey to Forever, which is easy to stumble across when first looking for info. It is out-of-date and has quite a few errors. Eventually I’ll post my own tutorial on this site.

Frameworks for Perceiving and Addressing Poverty

I have an interview tomorrow morning with a reporter from the Martlett (University of Victoria student paper), who contacted me after reading my plea for funding to work on my book. So I wanted to share some of the thoughts I have been assembling in my mind in preperation for the interview.

One of the main things I intend to touch upon in A Poverty Of Perception is the way that we perceive poverty; by which I mean not just the stereotypes and prejudices towards people in poverty, but also the frameworks used by activists, scholars and policy-makers when addressing this issue.

A predominant perception, particulairly among economists, is that poverty is an economic problem. This definition gives way to solutions that are rooted in economic growth and development. The well documented failure of economic development to sufficently impact poverty dispells this notion rather easily.

More difficult to dispell is the framework used by many radical activists that targets capitalism as the cause of poverty, usually setting up an argument for socialism or anarchism of some form.

Thoughts on the Occupy movement

I first want to make it clear that anything I have to say about the Occupy movement is not meant as ‘horizontal hostility’ (activist-speak for attacking allies). I do have criticism, and the thing about horizontal hostility is that it is not always malicious. It can sometimes be well-meaning critique, but a well-meaning critique can sometimes be difficult to pull off.

I certainly share the Occupy movement’s concern with economic inequity. And I also am a veteren of some direct action occupation protest camps. Many times since the end of the Bear Mountain Treesit, I’ve found myself wishing I could be out on the frontlines like that again, putting my body and freedom on the line for something I believe in.

So there are some who expected me to be all about this Occuopy thing. Indeed, some of my comrades from the treesit and from the tent city movement were right down there, jumping in feet first.

Dreams of being a Free-Roaming Human

In 2007 I attempted to walk across Canada. I only lasted 3 days, so it was a lame attempt, but it was officially an attempt nonetheless.

Calling the walk “Free Roaming Human” I declared that I was making the journey to raise awareness about wild bison. I had just returned to Canada after spending a couple seasons volunteering for the Buffalo Field Campaign in Montana, and while I was down there I learned about the wild bison herds in Canada, specifically the one in Wood Buffalo National Park.

A Kind of Agoraphobia

Not many of my friends have seen me lately; in person that is. Those who are are online have certainly seen me posting all day long on a certain social media site. The truth is I don’t leave the house much, and as my roommates will tell you, I don’t leave my room much either. I’ve been reading about agoraphobia, and as is the case with a lot of phobias, neurosis, and disorders, I have issues with the definitions, but I see a lot of my experience reflected in this condition.

According to what I’ve been reading, agoraphobia is “an anxiety disorder defined as a morbid fear of having a panic attack or panic-like symptoms in a situation from which it is perceived to be difficult (or embarrassing) to escape.”

Envisioning the perfect job

Now that I have a place to live and am no longer homeless, my experience of poverty is that of unemployed. I’m in the process of applying for welfare, but unless I end up being diagnosed with a ‘condition’ that reflects an inability to find or hold employment, I’m required to keep looking for work.

Lately I’ve been reflecting on what the ideal job would be, what it is I am meant to be doing, or at the very least, can tolerate enough to stay employed at. I’m lucky enough to have quite a few skills, and have been envisioning how to put them to use, and what it would look like to get paid to do so.

I think about what I currently spend my time doing. Reading and writing about poverty and homelessness takes up the vast majority of my day. I am pretty much obsessed with the fact that so many people are without the most basic of necessities in the land of plenty while so many others are oblivious to this reality, or hold misguided notions that people choose to be homeless, or deserve to be. I have been studying this issue for long enough to know that shifting people’s perceptions is extremely difficult. The reality of the situation is that those of us who do care about alleviating poverty and homelessness (and ultimately ending it) truly need to be doing everything we can.

On seeking a diagnosis / applying for disability

I am applying for welfare again this week, and based on the advise of several people who are close to me, I will be declaring at that time my intention to be be considered for Person With Multiple Persistant Barriers, or Person With Disability benefits.

As I mentioned in some recent blog postings, I am a deeply sensitive person, and related to this trait I also experience depression, anxiety and migrane headaches, as well as some intense ‘twitches’, (which are not done justice by the word twitch, but are not actually convulsions, either.) that are the result of repressed emotion and compounded trauma.

I have not worked a full-time job since 2003, and have not worked at all for almost 3 years. Lately I hardly even leave the house, am in a constant state of overwhelm, and stressed out so much my muscles ache.

The good news is I have a very strong sense of self-awareness. I have a path to healing that I have a hard time staying on, but is otherwise very clear to me. If it were not for this clarity and self-awareness, I would not go anywhere near a doctor’s office to talk about these things. As is stands, I feel strong enough to get a diagnosis, yet not let that diagnosis define me or mean much to me at all, except as my ticket to being able to get onto welfare and be able to pay the rent. I’ve no ‘medical history’ of mental illness symptoms because I’ve never trusted the medical system and I’ve only talked to one doctor at a walk-in clinic about these issues.

A desperate need for community action on poverty.

I live on the west coast, in a city that has the mildest weather of any city in Canada. We don’t get snow very often, and when we do, we are rarely prepared for it. I’m not talking about driving conditions. Hell no. See, this is an example of what pisses me off about the media, and the priorities of the dominant society in general. When a tanker carrying diesel crashes on the highway and spills 30,000 litres of fuel into the river, the concern is not for the salmon in that river, but for the traffic delays that the accident has caused. Along the same lines, when the weather drops below freezing and a big snow dumps on us, the media is filled with articles about what this does to driving conditions, not the fact that we still have hundreds of people out there on the street without homes.

I know what one of the problems is. Public perceptions of poverty are in drastic need of a shift into reality. Right now the dominant perception is mythical. The majority of people still seem to believe that people in poverty are lazy, and that they could solve their own poverty by just working harder. Over the years many book and reports have been written dispelling this myth, but to no avail. Recently in the US, those perceptions have started shifting, and not because people finally took the time to research and listen, but because the middle class has started slipping into poverty, and people are learning first-hand that poverty is not about laziness, but about some serious systemic problems with society.